retrac

13 ms·

151.
by retrac 11mo ago
If you are a scifi author, it's a mistake to give any hard numbers in real-world units. You will, most likely, greatly underestimate. Even trying to greatly overestimate, you will underestimate. Commander Data's specifications i
152.
by retrac 11mo ago
My hearing aids provide some relief for my tinnitus when I'm wearing them.
153.
by retrac 11mo ago
I use Bluetooth with my phone and sometimes my laptop. My current hearing aids can stream directly from devices with Bluetooth LE audio; no relay dongle necessary. But at home I often use telecoil. It's one of the killer features for
154.
by retrac 11mo ago
Just as a tip, shouting or even just speaking more loudly is rarely necessary if someone has (properly configured) hearing aids. Just speak clearly. Ensuring proper enunciation so they can read lips is usually more important. Hearing aid
155.
by retrac 11mo ago
I'm completely lost in noise. The benefits for this kind of thing is part of why my audiologist pushed for hearing aids with directional microphones. And they do help. But it's not a fix. I'm still mostly lost in noise. P
156.
by retrac 11mo ago
I have worn hearing aids since childhood in the '90s. Moderate sloping to profound loss. Been through all the tech since the equalized analog era. For a while now, like the last 15 to 20 years, since hearing aids went DSP, I had not
157.
by retrac 11mo ago
VAX were relatively small computers for the time. They grew upward in the late 80s eventually rivalling the mainframes for speed (and cost). But in the early 80s IBM's high end machines were an entire order of magnitude larger. Top
158.
by retrac 11mo ago
The Bell System was, in modern parlance, fully vertically integrated. They didn't own the mines that the copper for the conductors was extracted from. And they didn't cast the copper ingots. Though they were interested in the m
159.
by retrac 11mo ago
> The CPU (the Motorola 68000) initiates all communication in the case of the Macintosh Minor nitpick but the video controller has direct access to RAM and when the visible part of the display is being drawn by the video controller, it d
160.
by retrac 11mo ago
> But I was, ironically, left with an impression that the Victorian era was more comfortable with male intimacy, and appreciation for male beauty, than our own. This might not be an entirely faulty perception. Wilde was, I think, aiming
161.
by retrac 11mo ago
India has shown some of the most interest to date, due to their lack of domestic uranium reserves. But it's been slow going their fast breeder reactor plans were delayed by like two decades. But it is built and it was loaded with fue
162.
by retrac 11mo ago
Here in Toronto, every once in a while, someone has a meltdown (if you'll forgive the expression) when they rediscover that there is a CANDU nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in their dense and quiet suburb. Now CANDU reactors run on na
163.
by retrac 11mo ago
I'm not sure about daily. But yes, human sacrifice was practiced in predynastic China. At least one polity in the late Shang (c. 2000 BC) seems to have staged enormous mass executions as public spectacles. One of the questions someti
164.
by retrac 11mo ago
Getting a bit off topic, but I feel like this task is something that ought to have special language support. It's a kind of serialization/deserialization, or what I think Python and some others call "pickling". Same tas
165.
by retrac 11mo ago
The evidence is being expanded over time. And it feels like the scale on every dimension is always being revised upward. For one thing, the Maya are just one group of peoples in the region. There are and were other peoples in the region.
166.
by retrac 11mo ago
Robert Nordier's port of v7 to x86 probably didn't get the attention it deserves. It's what it sounds like: v7 Unix ported to x86. Unix v7 was portable enough and the PDP-11 architecturally similar enough to x86 that almost
167.
by retrac 11mo ago
Since no one else has noted it: they show rail lines and only rail. No roads on those maps. This includes some quite obscure ones like the railway between Labrador and Sept-Iles, Quebec. (It has almost no traffic and it serves a small tow
168.
by retrac 11mo ago
Very cool. I've been sketching out a relay computer myself. Mostly unbuilt but I have tested a variety of circuits implementing gates, latches, oscillators, flip flops, counters, registers all using only SPST reed relays. I'm fi
169.
by retrac 11mo ago
I am deaf but not completely deaf. Some sounds I can hear and a lot of the sounds that are loud enough to come to my attention are annoying . Often not the same sounds that annoy other people, too. I'm reminded of a conversation wit
170.
The world is in a new age of variable geometry, says Canadian PM Mark Carney(economist.com)
4 points by retrac 11mo ago|0 comments
171.
by retrac 11mo ago
For the first time in about a century there is uncertainty about the future of Canada's economic and security alignment. It's like starting a business with your best friend. And now he's gone manic and has shown up at your d
172.
by retrac 11mo ago
Most of what you think you are seeing at any moment is only imagined. The retina is not uniform. Most photosensitive cells (cones) are near the centre of vision. Peripheral vision has little resolving power. Can't make out fine deta
173.
by retrac 11mo ago
> There’s tacit admission of defeat in this, it’s basically saying America doesn’t have the political power necessary to offset globalization and its forces. That is a core theme of the admin. They seem to be radically pessimistic about
174.
by retrac 11mo ago
You might be able to use that old floppy drive. But you won't be able to use that old Pentium machine the drive is in. Because you will need several hundred gigabytes of RAM and a very fast IO bus. The gold standard today for archivin
175.
by retrac 11mo ago
While it isn't exactly communication , the Moon is not the only planetary body of which signals have been bounced off. Radar is workable within the solar system, including the moons and rings of the outer planets. https://
176.
by retrac 11mo ago
Asian domesticated rice isn't the only kind of rice. Several related species grow wild in central North America, particularly in the wetlands around the Great Lakes and on the Prairies. Naturally cold-adapted rice. It may have been
177.
by retrac 11mo ago
> with no support for updating fields While it's not yet standard nearly all Standard ML implementations support what has become known as "Successor ML" [0]. A large subset of Successor ML is common to SML/NJ, MLton,
178.
by retrac 1y ago
I use an Intel Atom netbook from 2010 as my test system. It has 1 GB of RAM and an in-order x86 processor. CPU Benchmark gives it 120 Mop/s integer and 42 MiB/s for AES. (For comparison, my usual laptop, which is also nearly obso
179.
by retrac 1y ago
> more stable (if near-abandoned) pastures of Standard ML There's dozens of us! Hundreds maybe! It's not abandoned. It's more like with Lisp where the language is complete. Almost perfect as-is. Nothing left to take a
180.
by retrac 1y ago
When I want to close my eyes and distract myself, I've been visualizing the banana from the cover of that Velvet Underground album. (Not sure why I settled on that!) I can rotate it. I can peel it. With practice it has gotten large

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