retrac

65 ms·

811.
by retrac 3y ago
In the mid-20th century film switched to modern plastics like cellulose acetate, and later PET (which are still quite flammable). But before that, it was the first kind of plastic invented -- nitrocellulose plasticized with camphor. Nitr
812.
by retrac 3y ago
I suspect this is just a matter of style. Current style somewhat favours fast-paced action and pacing. But one can easily find counter-examples. There are contemporary productions that are absolutely plodding -- the recent miniseries The
813.
by retrac 3y ago
This certainly jives with my experience. When I have a brief image in a dream of a plausible, everyday thing, I sometimes have difficulty figuring out whether it's a real memory. Recently I dreamed about being in the living room whil
814.
by retrac 3y ago
Heavy water's only about $1000 a litre in bulk. Certainly cheap enough to run experiments on rats and small plants. Such experiments have been done. That's how we know it'll kill you. Its toxicity profile is kind of intere
815.
by retrac 3y ago
> It sounded digital in nature and was repeating. My tinnitus is somewhere between a sustained chorus that slowly changes its primary note, and yes, a low-speed multi-tone frequency-shift modem. [1] Closest description I can come up wit
816.
by retrac 3y ago
Well, radiation sources are a little more common than one might think, even today. I have half a dozen in my home -- smoke detectors, tritium lights. That may be in things people don't even expect. Objects made out of uranium glass m
817.
by retrac 3y ago
One interpretation is that nearly every person has some degree of tinnitus, but many are almost completely unaware of it - it's just perceived as silence under most circumstances. I hit my head once, and lost all hearing on one side; s
818.
by retrac 3y ago
Yeast also dies, and then is broken down, and consumed by the other yeast. Yeast also consumes other proteins and sugars in the fermenting liquid. It leaves behind a protein-enriched liquid with a unique taste. It's actually a use
819.
by retrac 3y ago
> “We don’t call it work refusal, we call it unemployment,” he said. Maybe we should distinguish between these categories. Because there does appear to be a relatively new phenomenon -- the never-employed adult. They're not unempl
820.
by retrac 3y ago
Glad to see other students of Akkadian here! Yeah, I had a little bit of luck with phonetic transcription - producing standard readings from the closely transcribed cuneiform. But mostly no. And it failed at translation with anything beyo
821.
by retrac 3y ago
Bit of trivia: the original development platform for Windows NT was the Intel i860, then MIPS. It was ported to x86 later. Design decision to keep x86-isms out. It was always intended to be very portable. Microsoft wanted into the high-
822.
by retrac 3y ago
Estuary English [1] -- the English spoken around the Thames estuary. It has, arguably, been the "standard" non-posh British dialect for a while. As a North American, I find it one of the harder accents to understand. It has und
823.
by retrac 3y ago
Society largely tuned out of the "does media impact its viewers psychologically or behaviourally?" debate in the 80s after the moral panic. And it was a moral panic. But I've always been uncomfortable with the opposite extre
824.
by retrac 3y ago
If you do wish to play around with it, given the age, I would suggest having someone familiar with older power supplies and CRT displays to test the PSU and CRT high voltage circuits. It's possible something of that vintage will have a
825.
by retrac 3y ago
We have spent the last seventy or more years working on machine translation. All the way back in the 1950s, big money went into it. Decades of hard work, mathematical models of human language, all manner of study, enormous bilingual corpus
826.
by retrac 3y ago
Mass production requires mass consumption.
827.
by retrac 3y ago
It's not intrinsic, no. It's possible to design a receiver with its local oscillator emissions to be down to an arbitrarily low emission standard. (But who actually does that?) And not all reception techniques require a local o
828.
by retrac 3y ago
> I'm sure a tiny bit of RF leaks out of the LNB Any receiver using the heterodyne principle (this includes most current digital radio modems) is trivially detected by its local oscillator, often to some considerable range (potentia
829.
by retrac 3y ago
> Are we reaching the point of diminishing returns of what a reasonably sized (for our current rockets) space telescope can see? In terms of sensitivity, yes. Collecting more light needs more light-collecting material, which ultimately
830.
by retrac 3y ago
More than anything else, there are fewer bombings today because the Irish dispute was settled through a political agreement. Violent republican separatism and monarchist unionism are, thankfully, now beyond the pale, for most of the politi
831.
by retrac 3y ago
They are generally. But it's hard to enforce particularly when the parents back the kids. The idea of their child not having a phone at-hand 24/7 so they can be surveilled is quite intolerable to some parents. The kids who first
832.
by retrac 3y ago
That has not been my experience; I've brought up copyright a fair bit in conversations over the years (much to the chagrin of my friends, acquaintances and coworkers, I'm sure). I've literally never met anyone who thinks the
833.
by retrac 3y ago
> Wouldn't the weight ever so marginally depend on the record? This raises an interesting point. It's very undesirable to have long sequences of all 0 or 1 in a digital stream that is being read subject to a lot of analog effe
834.
by retrac 3y ago
We struggle to define the traits, characteristics, properties of intelligence, sentience or awareness. Nor can we locate the physical processes, exactly, by which these things come into being in a human brain. Some voodoo to do with infor
835.
by retrac 3y ago
HQ sells it, basically, at-cost locally. The cost does go up, inflation and all that. The remainder that is exported above-cost is just profit for HQ, which is turned into further expansion and returns to the provincial budget. There are
836.
by retrac 3y ago
They still modified their behaviour dramatically. It's similar with Japan -- that also did not have much in the way of legally compelled measures. They would not have been constitutional there. But they still gave lots of financial s
837.
by retrac 3y ago
The budget is implemented with a law. There's a good reason for that. Parliament passes laws. And the budget is decided by Parliament. So they implement the budget with a law. The mechanism is fundamental to the Canadian (or UK) p
838.
by retrac 3y ago
This VM basically maps the SECD machine, directly to the underlying Clojure environment, which being Lisp, is very close to begin with. (Since SECD was first intended to implement languages like Lisp.) So, I suppose perhaps silly in the sa
839.
by retrac 3y ago
The potency of the placebo effect with psychoactive drugs is pretty remarkable. It also illustrates an interesting effect about the cultural influence on intoxication. It's one of the more easily repeatable placebo experiments. If yo
840.
by retrac 3y ago
A while ago, I walked through the park, that backs on to the house where I grew up. And I was struck with a shift of perspective. I remembered being up by the house in the yard. The perspective had been different, once. That little wood

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