For what it's worth, drinking soda carbonated to normal levels would be a pretty unpleasant experience in zero gravity (lots of burping & farting, probably cramps). I think Pepsi and/or Coca-Cola actually packages syrup for NASA that can be mixed with non-carbonated water (or very, very minimally-carbonated) water on the ISS.
Incidentally, there's abundant evidence that magnesium deficiency is a bigger risk factor for having a heart attack than cholesterol or fat.
Chronic sleep deprivation frequently results in magnesium-depletion.
Magnesium is what signals your muscles to relax. That's why cramps are easy to trigger when you're magnesium-deficient... muscles get the signal to contract... and do... but don't get the signal to relax, so they keep pulling as hard as they can. And often, opposing bundles of muscle start to pull simultaneously.
First aid tip: the best thing I've found to quickly shut down a wave of spasms is magnesium citrate laxative. It only takes an ounce or two, works within minutes, and *usually* won't act like a laxative in small amounts. I personally consider it to be an essential first-aid supply, on par with ibuprofen & bandages. Once I finally made the connection between sleep-deprivation, magnesium, and muscle spasms, treating both the immediate crisis (the spasm) and root cause (magnesium-depletion from sleep-deprivation) became a lot easier.
The biggest problem "night owls" have is living in a society that forces them to live in a state of life-long sleep-deprivation if they have any kind of normal job.
I just don't get tired naturally until 2 or 3am. I can fall asleep earlier if I'm sleep-deprived, but THEN my body treats it like an afternoon nap... I'll wake up 3-5 hours later, then be unable to fall asleep again until dawn. My earliest sustainable go-to-bed time is ~12:30am (with Ambien & melatonin).
I worked happily for years at a company that let me work 11-7 (usually a little later, but I didn't mind). I rarely got sick & did the best work in my life. Sadly, the company didn't survive The Great Recession.
I later worked for 2 months at a job that required me to get up at 6:30am... it damn near killed me. I was getting sick enough to need antibiotics every 2-3 weeks (mostly strep & sinus infections), crashed & burned into Friday night, and didn't start to feel "not awful" until Sunday... and then the hell began started again. My short-term memory went down the toilet & took months to heal after I quit.
By week 4 of my hellish early-morning job, I was having worse & worse muscle cramps... first, randomly at night. Then, sitting at my desk. Then at completely random moments, including driving or just walking. I'm convinced I was weeks away from having a heart attack that would basically have been just another muscle cramp, and probably would have literally died if I'd kept it up.
My visits to Weird Stuff Warehouse & HSC were among the most fun parts of my trips to Silicon Valley. South Florida has been a diy electronics outback forever, and I totally envied people who lived in "the valley" & could LITERALLY go out & casually buy a logic analyzer or oscilloscope on a random Sunday afternoon.
I remember *almost* buying a Silicon Graphics workstation there, just because it was cheap & was the one computer even AMIGA owners reverently mentioned in hushed tones back in the late 80s. From what I recall, I didn't because phone-internet didn't *quite* work well yet (~2007), and I just couldn't do enough on-the-spot research to convince myself I'd be able to get it to actually *work* once I got home. Sigh.
It absolutely BLOWS MY MIND that Skycraft doesn't have special hours on "Orlando Hamfest Saturday" (say, 6pm-midnight). I guarantee that 60-70% of visitors who went to the Hamfest on Saturday would go to Skycraft that same evening after dinner & spend a shit-ton of money there.
One caveat re: using Arduino/Pi + low-cost digital servos to build a diy animated water fountain: low-cost servos just can't take the sustained abuse of being run for even a few hours per day... they'll work for a few days or weeks... maybe 6-18 months if you only run them occasionally for a few minutes at a time... then die. And there's basically no sane middle ground between cheap servos with plastic gears & bearings, and ungodly-expensive Bellagio/Disney-grade servos & electronic valves that can run for years (and even the Bellagio/Disney-grade servos & electronic valves have relatively short service lives compared to older technologies, like cam-controlled valves).
Source: I built a fountain like that in my front yard. The first servo broke during week 3. By month 4, a third of them were flaky or dead. It sat mostly-unused & increasingly-dysfunctional for 2 years until I finally stuck 3 cheap pumps & nozzles into the tank so it would do *something* besides serve as a mosquito breeding ground.
Also... weatherproofing an Arduino or Pi against Florida's corrosive heat, humidity, and rain is *hard*. And if you DO somehow manage to fill it with dry air & seal it so it's airtight (so you won't have dew condensing inside at night), it'll cook itself. You just can't win. At best, you can make your outdoor electronics cheap & easy to replace, then say 'fuck it' and LET the dew & corrosion ruin it every few months. Or drill a hole through the wall, pull a cable with enough wires through, and keep the controller indoors & under air conditioning.
Finally, before you go down the laminar-flow rabbit hole, do some serious research into the problems people have with "cutters" (the valve that allows you to cleanly start & stop the water flow without splashing, so you can do "EPCOT-style" skipping water jets... it's a *hard* problem to solve cheaply, and the biggest one that causes people to give up.
FDOT used to ROUTINELY allow road configurations that are/were absolutely LETHAL to pedestrians (think: 8-lane roads with traffic lights, roads with 3 left-turn lanes and nowhere safe to stand between the left-turn lanes & thru-lanes, and crosswalk signals that were like the ghosts in a sped-up Pac Man game... solid "Don't Walk" -> one single blink of "Walk" -> 3 blinks of "Don't Walk" -> solid "Don't Walk".
The road I had to cross was one of the better ones... at least it HAD "refuge zones" between the left-turn lanes, thru-lanes, and right-turn lane... but it had pac man timing, so getting across meant waiting for three light cycles.
You might have walked 3 miles to school uphill with a wood stove on your back, but you probably DIDN'T have to cross roads that were practically freeways with grade crossings & ZERO consideration for pedestrian safety.
> Something is wrong with you if you are drenched in sweat in a 1.5 mile trip.
You obviously haven't been to SW Florida. In the summer, 95 degrees @ 99% humidity is fucking BRUTAL. I've had to change into dry clothes just from walking 50 feet to the mailbox. Even in mid-February, 80-degree (@ 90%+ humidity) days are common.
South Florida has two seasons... "Summer" and "January"
Exactly. Millennials & GenZ are just as smart as previous generations... the difference is, if a GenX'er had a computer in elementary school, it was a lifestyle that defined you & made you a nerd. By the time Millennials were adults, computers were taken for granted (even in tech-illiterate non-nerdy families).
Ditto for mobile phones. If a GenX'er had a mobile phone in high school, it meant his family was REALLY RICH. For an 18 year old Millennial, it meant you were at least upper middle class. For GenZ, it's a middle school rite of passage noteworthy mainly because it means you're no longer limited to wi-fi.
DUMB Millennials & GenZ'ers wouldn't have owed a computer AT ALL if they'd been teens prior to the mid-1990s (or they would have owned a Macintosh... & had NO FUCKING IDEA how to use it for anything besides word processing). The GenZ kids who are the descendants of GenX'ers who grew up with computers are NOW into building robots.
Let's not forget, many of them ALSO live in gated communities, where just GETTING to the nearest public sidewalk beyond the gate could EASILY be a half-mile trek. From my own childhood, I'd say ~1/2 mile is the limit for casual trip by bike, and 1.5-3 miles is the absolute frontier for a highly-motivated trip that will leave them drenched in sweat and tired when they arrive(*)
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(*) example distances for me. Note that I grew up in a small town with no public transportation WHATSOEVER. It now has buses, but the routes are about 2-3 miles apart, so any trip will probably involve a 0.5-1.5 mile walk at both ends to/from the nearest stop.
7-Eleven: 1/2 mile, no big deal by bike unless it was raining.
Strip mall at end of street (had gameroom where I spent quarters by the pail): 1/4 mile. Biked without a second thought, walked w/umbrella when it rained.
Best friend's house: 0.9 mile. A trek. Generally a once-a-day round trip for both of us. More trips (or on rainy days) demanded one of our parents to drive.
Library & movie theater: 1.5 mile. God, I hated this trip. But I did it 2-3x/week in middle school anyway.
School: biked to elementary school (1/2 mile), but middle (7 miles) and high school (9 miles) were definitely car-only zones.
The mall: 9 miles. Absolutely required getting a parent to drive
I miss the golden days of "Socket 7", when I went for what seemed like almost 10 years by just swapping CPUs (at one point, keeping the current cpu & replacing the mobo with another socket 7 mATX board for some reason I can't remember. No matter how hard Intel tried to kill it, everyone else treated it like a de-facto standard & it just became even MORE entrenched until PC-100 ram finally became too limiting (and expensive... from what I recall, 128mb of pc100 cost about 2-3x as much as 128mb of pc133 or DDR-1, to the point where you could pay for a new mobo with the ram savings alone).
Quick, who invented "the telephone"? Alexander Graham Bell? Nope. He was just a CEO with the connections & persistence to get approval to string wires over public right-of-ways. The 19th century's equivalent of today's Arduino & RasPi-using "Makers" had been sending sound over wires for YEARS. They were just unusable, impractical, or useless as commercial products.
Ditto for "electric light". Arc lights existed in France at least 50 years before Edison was born. What Edison "invented" was "the electric company" (and bulbs that could be affordably mass-produced & used by someone without the resources to buy, maintain, and operate his own dynamo).
"The Soviets" arguably have a strong partial claim to inventing cell phones... CDMA (which forms the basis of modern 3g and LTE) was invented by Leonid Kupriyanovich. In the SIXTIES, he built a CDMA phone that could fit in your pocket. In 1970, the Soviet Union arguably had better mobile telephone service than the US did (not as a consumer service, obviously... but IMTS in the US was a technological dead end with 5+ year waiting lists for service in NYC & LA).
The point is, "inventions" rarely happen in a vacuum. Someone invents new components, others find new ways to combine & use them, and others eventually figure out how to make money with them.
Another example: stadium-sized LED TVs. No great surprise... everyone with an EE degree in the 1970s knew you could build a big TV using red, green, and blue LEDs... the catch was, blue LEDs didn't exist commercially, and red LEDs were dim. Then blue LEDs existed, but were dim. Then they were bright, but cost $5 apiece... and you needed at least 16,000 of them to show a reasonable NTSC-resolution image. So, who truly "invented" the big LED tv? Sony was (AFAIK) first to sell one commercially, but as a concept, it was an inevitable no-brainer just waiting for the parts to become affordable.
DNA can only be used to exonerate, not convict. Law enforcement might use it to identify potential suspects for further scrutiny, but when it comes to a court & jury, the only thing DNA proves is that it either a) could not possibly have been you, or b) might have been someone related to you.
Three years ago, I had my DNA analyzed by 23andme. According to my raw SNP data, there's no evidence of the genes for delayed sleep phase disorder... but I unquestionably have it, and have since childhood (& probably before). I found seemingly blatant discrepancies in a few other reported SNPs that appear to diverge quite a bit from observed reality.
I can think of a few possibilities:
* Promethase incorrectly interpreted my raw data & reported SNPs with incorrect values.
* The lab didn't actually sequence those specific values... it reported them based on indirect markers elsewhere that didn't necessarily pan out in this case
* The sample was contaminated by the lab (unlikely?)
* The lab's test for the relevant SNP was inaccurate... or at least, a lot less precise than the raw results imply.
I'd like to eventually get my genome analyzed again... by a company that uses a different lab, with slightly different test... but reports the results in a form that can be directly compared (SNP-for-SNP) with the original (or at least, deterministically converted into equivalent SNP form) to find discrepancies & get an objective idea about the likely error rate for the first.
Part of the problem is that programming a car to safely drive autonomously on a limited-access freeway is ENORMOUSLY easier than programming a car to do the same thing on a "normal" road, unless the "normal" road is completely gridlocked & the car is just creeping along a few feet at a time.
High-speed (but non-limited-access) divided highways with grade crossings and pedestrians are still very much in the "experimental" zone when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
There are common situations where autonomous vehicles are at LEAST as safe overall as a real-world distracted driver (freeways, gridlocked city streets with stop-and-go traffic)... but expecting autonomous vehicles to safely drive themselves on high-speed suburban roads with pedestrians and cross-traffic is probably still a bit premature.
Texas has most of that space because it made a POINT of identifying future freeway corridors & bought up 200-300 feet of cheap ROW through the former hinterlands of Dallas, Houston, etc. way back in the 50s & 60s... so you'll find places where there are two 2-lane roads a block apart with literally NOTHING between them. As the traffic increases, the pair of 2-lane roads become a pair of one-way roads with 3 lanes apiece (functioning as a divided 6-lane highway with a HUGE grassy median). Eventually, Texas builds a new freeway in the middle, and the existing lanes become its frontage road.
Ergo, Texas can easily transform former country roads like SR-121 into full-blown freeways with minimal drama, in the time it would take Florida to buy half the necessary land at 4x the original estimated price, or for California to do 5 environmental impact studies so NIMBYs can find an excuse to kill the project.
Florida cities literally plan ahead for almost nothing... Orlando is LITTERED with aborted freeway stubs where they started building before owning the ROW, then had to back up and find a different path because in the meantime some developer was allowed to build something big & expensive directly in the planned path.
That's the single biggest difference between Florida & places like California, Texas, NY, etc... we start building things without an unambiguous & assured path to completion (or guaranteed funding to build it). Georgia seems to be as bad as Florida in that respect. NY & CA have their share of projects aborted due to public opposition, but neither state would EVER say, "here's where the freeway is going", then stupidly allow someone to build a 30-story tower in that direct path anyway.
In Miami, there are exits like SR-826 to NW 25th Street where you could literally spend 35 minutes from the moment you come to your first stop in the exit lanes (assuming it hasn't backed up all the way to the PREVIOUS on-ramp) until you've FINALLY turned left onto the road you're exiting to.
Another truly awful exit: southbound Turnpike to westbound Pines Blvd. In theory, it should be a breeze... a straightforward "exit and turn right". In reality, there's a right-turn traffic light (with no turn on red) on a stupid timer that isn't synchronized to ANYTHING & blindly turns green once every 8-10 minutes. At 6pm, it's useful... at 9pm, you're better off following the old ramp to the original exit & making a left turn, because THAT light cycles every 2 minutes. Broward has better roads than Dade, but does a shit job of synchronizing traffic-light timing. It fixes everything once, then lets it slide into entropy light by light for the next 5 years.
From what I've read, the big problem in Florida used to be the way road construction was funded. If a road had ${n} budgeted and a timeline of ${m} months, exactly ${n}/${m} would be doled out every month, regardless of what was actually being DONE that month. So contractors would put up barricades to show "due diligence", start cashing checks, then wait until enough subsequent checks were deposited to pay for the equipment they'd have to lease & the initial crew. From that point, the remainder of the project was a dance of keeping at least a few workers visibly working at all times, while postponing EXPENSIVE next steps until enough cash accrued to fund it. Thus, ANY "small" road project took exactly 24 months, a 2-to-4 lane project always took 48-60 months, and a major project always took 72-84 months.
In contrast, California did a better job of matching payments to project cash flow, so construction companies THERE could afford to do things that would be UNFATHOMABLE in Florida, like building all 4 major ramps of a new freeway interchange SIMULTANEOUSLY instead of one... by... one. Ergo, Caltrans could (re-)build an entire 34 mile freeway in the time FDOT took to add a second left-turn lane to an existing 4 or 6-lane road.
FDOT has gotten better than it used to be (to a large extent, thanks to changes driven by Jeb Bush, who had enough background in construction to know that FDOT's old strategy was bullshit), but we STILL aren't quite at the point of simultaneous flyover construction yet (allegedly, because there's a major shortage of suitable cranes are compared to California... Caltrans pays to keep extra crane capacity on hand & ready to deploy on a week's notice so it can act quickly after an earthquake, while FDOT still totally leaves it up to private companies making their own cost-benefit decisions... cheaper, but at the cost of agility & speed).
Texas got it right... you can't build your way out of congestion one new lane at a time. To make a visible difference in congestion, you have to PROFOUNDLY increase the capacity of the region's entire road network. Do it one piddling lane at a time, and your gains get instantly eaten up by induced demand. Rebuild every antique 6-lane freeway into 24 lanes (built "Texas-style" -- 6-8 lanes for traffic that's just driving through, 8-14 lanes for traffic going to or from the city, and another 6-8 lanes for cars getting on or off within the next 3-5 miles), grade-separate major thoroughfares, and ideally build a decent rail transit network at the same time & as part of the same project, and you can have a city where driving 10 miles at 7pm is almost as fast as driving 2 miles at noon.
Vector graphics were a cool, non-blocky alternative to low-res bitmaps, but a modern "4k" TV (or even 720p, for that matter) can render a smoother-looking line from a 24-bit anti-aliased bitmap than an Atari color vector CRT with.39mm dot pitch from Tempest EVER could. If anything, Tempest at 1280x720 looks TOO good... you need 2160x1440 or better to convincingly render in the alignment & shadow-mask artifacts seen in a REAL color vector display.
Google's alignment falls roughly into the triangular region bounded by "Chaotic Good", "Lawful Neutral", and "Neutral Neutral" (Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis, Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other, Neutral Neutral in the middle).
Even IF "Steamboat Willie" became public domain tomorrow, all that would REALLY mean is that you could scan & digitize the original & put it on Youtube without risking Disney's wrath. Attempting to create NEW works involving Mickey Mouse based upon Steamboat Willie would be nearly impossible... 99% of what we think of as canonical "Mickey Mouse" came LONG after Steamboat Willie, and the majority of it will be protected by trademark law as long as Disney's army of lawyers keep up with their paperwork.
Ditto, for Cinderella & Snow White. Yeah, the Grimm Brothers wrote the originals... but if you're American (or European, or otherwise grew up with Disney inextricably woven into your childhood's culture), probably 90% of what YOU think of as "Snow White" or "Cinderella" is REALLY "Disney's Snow White" or "Disney's Cinderella".
The "American Way" would be, "build an artificial island between the Pacific & SF Bay" and new port facilities somewhere on the "Pacific" side.
We're a nation of pioneers who CELEBRATE our triumphs over nature & revere those who made it possible. We've reversed the course of rivers, turned ephemeral sandbars into prime urban real estate, literally sliced away mountainsides to make room for new roads, and built a pipeline through 800 miles of frozen tundra without having it melt the permafrost & sink into the mud.
Compared to what we'll have to do to fortify the east coast, protecting SF Bay with a mile-long dike is almost child's play.
A guerrilla war by angry Nexus owners to associate "P" with "Poop" (and alternate mascot featuring the Android logo with a poop-emoji hat) as revenge for force-obsoleting still-fairly-new hardware by breaking kernel binary drivers without an official solution.
A few hundred developers doing it in every related blog & forum post they make, and within days Google searches will either be suggesting "Android Poop", or Google will have to tamper with search results to suppress it & risk bad press when they're caught.
Think it can't work? Google "Santorum".
Never underestimate the kind of guerrilla negative public relations campaign developers can do. "Regular" people might sigh & move on. Developers will latch on & become OBSESSED with it for months. Hopefully, Google's management knows this AND how easily it could neutralize that anger simply by informally releasing new kernel binaries for Nexus devices.
Google's decision to not support Nexus devices with an OTA update is semi-understandable, but it would be really nice of them to AT LEAST continue with kernels, compatible binary kernel modules built for proprietary peripherals in Nexus devices, and updates to Google's own apps (esp. Play Services & Play store) for another 3 years. Why? Because they're the only ones who CAN make new binaries for Nexus devices. Qualcomm lets THEM have access to source & reference drivers the rest of us will never be allowed to touch directly.
In other words, after the end of formal support, there should bs an additional 3 year period where they do what only THEY ALONE can, so we can do the rest ourselves (vis-a-vis AOSP).
(background: Unlike Windows, Linux makes NO effort to maintain binary driver compatibility between kernels. If you have the source, it's easy to just recompile old drivers for the new Kernel. If you DON'T have the source, you're fucked. Recompiling isn't necessarily HARD... often, it can be mostly automated. But Google has the source... we don't, and never will. So only THEY can do this for us.)
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For what it's worth, drinking soda carbonated to normal levels would be a pretty unpleasant experience in zero gravity (lots of burping & farting, probably cramps). I think Pepsi and/or Coca-Cola actually packages syrup for NASA that can be mixed with non-carbonated water (or very, very minimally-carbonated) water on the ISS.
Incidentally, there's abundant evidence that magnesium deficiency is a bigger risk factor for having a heart attack than cholesterol or fat.
Chronic sleep deprivation frequently results in magnesium-depletion.
Magnesium is what signals your muscles to relax. That's why cramps are easy to trigger when you're magnesium-deficient... muscles get the signal to contract... and do... but don't get the signal to relax, so they keep pulling as hard as they can. And often, opposing bundles of muscle start to pull simultaneously.
First aid tip: the best thing I've found to quickly shut down a wave of spasms is magnesium citrate laxative. It only takes an ounce or two, works within minutes, and *usually* won't act like a laxative in small amounts. I personally consider it to be an essential first-aid supply, on par with ibuprofen & bandages. Once I finally made the connection between sleep-deprivation, magnesium, and muscle spasms, treating both the immediate crisis (the spasm) and root cause (magnesium-depletion from sleep-deprivation) became a lot easier.
The biggest problem "night owls" have is living in a society that forces them to live in a state of life-long sleep-deprivation if they have any kind of normal job.
I just don't get tired naturally until 2 or 3am. I can fall asleep earlier if I'm sleep-deprived, but THEN my body treats it like an afternoon nap... I'll wake up 3-5 hours later, then be unable to fall asleep again until dawn. My earliest sustainable go-to-bed time is ~12:30am (with Ambien & melatonin).
I worked happily for years at a company that let me work 11-7 (usually a little later, but I didn't mind). I rarely got sick & did the best work in my life. Sadly, the company didn't survive The Great Recession.
I later worked for 2 months at a job that required me to get up at 6:30am... it damn near killed me. I was getting sick enough to need antibiotics every 2-3 weeks (mostly strep & sinus infections), crashed & burned into Friday night, and didn't start to feel "not awful" until Sunday... and then the hell began started again. My short-term memory went down the toilet & took months to heal after I quit.
By week 4 of my hellish early-morning job, I was having worse & worse muscle cramps... first, randomly at night. Then, sitting at my desk. Then at completely random moments, including driving or just walking. I'm convinced I was weeks away from having a heart attack that would basically have been just another muscle cramp, and probably would have literally died if I'd kept it up.
My visits to Weird Stuff Warehouse & HSC were among the most fun parts of my trips to Silicon Valley. South Florida has been a diy electronics outback forever, and I totally envied people who lived in "the valley" & could LITERALLY go out & casually buy a logic analyzer or oscilloscope on a random Sunday afternoon.
I remember *almost* buying a Silicon Graphics workstation there, just because it was cheap & was the one computer even AMIGA owners reverently mentioned in hushed tones back in the late 80s. From what I recall, I didn't because phone-internet didn't *quite* work well yet (~2007), and I just couldn't do enough on-the-spot research to convince myself I'd be able to get it to actually *work* once I got home. Sigh.
It absolutely BLOWS MY MIND that Skycraft doesn't have special hours on "Orlando Hamfest Saturday" (say, 6pm-midnight). I guarantee that 60-70% of visitors who went to the Hamfest on Saturday would go to Skycraft that same evening after dinner & spend a shit-ton of money there.
One caveat re: using Arduino/Pi + low-cost digital servos to build a diy animated water fountain: low-cost servos just can't take the sustained abuse of being run for even a few hours per day... they'll work for a few days or weeks... maybe 6-18 months if you only run them occasionally for a few minutes at a time... then die. And there's basically no sane middle ground between cheap servos with plastic gears & bearings, and ungodly-expensive Bellagio/Disney-grade servos & electronic valves that can run for years (and even the Bellagio/Disney-grade servos & electronic valves have relatively short service lives compared to older technologies, like cam-controlled valves).
Source: I built a fountain like that in my front yard. The first servo broke during week 3. By month 4, a third of them were flaky or dead. It sat mostly-unused & increasingly-dysfunctional for 2 years until I finally stuck 3 cheap pumps & nozzles into the tank so it would do *something* besides serve as a mosquito breeding ground.
Also... weatherproofing an Arduino or Pi against Florida's corrosive heat, humidity, and rain is *hard*. And if you DO somehow manage to fill it with dry air & seal it so it's airtight (so you won't have dew condensing inside at night), it'll cook itself. You just can't win. At best, you can make your outdoor electronics cheap & easy to replace, then say 'fuck it' and LET the dew & corrosion ruin it every few months. Or drill a hole through the wall, pull a cable with enough wires through, and keep the controller indoors & under air conditioning.
Finally, before you go down the laminar-flow rabbit hole, do some serious research into the problems people have with "cutters" (the valve that allows you to cleanly start & stop the water flow without splashing, so you can do "EPCOT-style" skipping water jets... it's a *hard* problem to solve cheaply, and the biggest one that causes people to give up.
FDOT used to ROUTINELY allow road configurations that are/were absolutely LETHAL to pedestrians (think: 8-lane roads with traffic lights, roads with 3 left-turn lanes and nowhere safe to stand between the left-turn lanes & thru-lanes, and crosswalk signals that were like the ghosts in a sped-up Pac Man game... solid "Don't Walk" -> one single blink of "Walk" -> 3 blinks of "Don't Walk" -> solid "Don't Walk".
The road I had to cross was one of the better ones... at least it HAD "refuge zones" between the left-turn lanes, thru-lanes, and right-turn lane... but it had pac man timing, so getting across meant waiting for three light cycles.
You might have walked 3 miles to school uphill with a wood stove on your back, but you probably DIDN'T have to cross roads that were practically freeways with grade crossings & ZERO consideration for pedestrian safety.
> Something is wrong with you if you are drenched in sweat in a 1.5 mile trip.
You obviously haven't been to SW Florida. In the summer, 95 degrees @ 99% humidity is fucking BRUTAL. I've had to change into dry clothes just from walking 50 feet to the mailbox. Even in mid-February, 80-degree (@ 90%+ humidity) days are common.
South Florida has two seasons... "Summer" and "January"
Exactly. Millennials & GenZ are just as smart as previous generations... the difference is, if a GenX'er had a computer in elementary school, it was a lifestyle that defined you & made you a nerd. By the time Millennials were adults, computers were taken for granted (even in tech-illiterate non-nerdy families).
Ditto for mobile phones. If a GenX'er had a mobile phone in high school, it meant his family was REALLY RICH. For an 18 year old Millennial, it meant you were at least upper middle class. For GenZ, it's a middle school rite of passage noteworthy mainly because it means you're no longer limited to wi-fi.
DUMB Millennials & GenZ'ers wouldn't have owed a computer AT ALL if they'd been teens prior to the mid-1990s (or they would have owned a Macintosh... & had NO FUCKING IDEA how to use it for anything besides word processing). The GenZ kids who are the descendants of GenX'ers who grew up with computers are NOW into building robots.
Let's not forget, many of them ALSO live in gated communities, where just GETTING to the nearest public sidewalk beyond the gate could EASILY be a half-mile trek. From my own childhood, I'd say ~1/2 mile is the limit for casual trip by bike, and 1.5-3 miles is the absolute frontier for a highly-motivated trip that will leave them drenched in sweat and tired when they arrive(*)
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(*) example distances for me. Note that I grew up in a small town with no public transportation WHATSOEVER. It now has buses, but the routes are about 2-3 miles apart, so any trip will probably involve a 0.5-1.5 mile walk at both ends to/from the nearest stop.
7-Eleven: 1/2 mile, no big deal by bike unless it was raining.
Strip mall at end of street (had gameroom where I spent quarters by the pail): 1/4 mile. Biked without a second thought, walked w/umbrella when it rained.
Best friend's house: 0.9 mile. A trek. Generally a once-a-day round trip for both of us. More trips (or on rainy days) demanded one of our parents to drive.
Library & movie theater: 1.5 mile. God, I hated this trip. But I did it 2-3x/week in middle school anyway.
School: biked to elementary school (1/2 mile), but middle (7 miles) and high school (9 miles) were definitely car-only zones.
The mall: 9 miles. Absolutely required getting a parent to drive
I miss the golden days of "Socket 7", when I went for what seemed like almost 10 years by just swapping CPUs (at one point, keeping the current cpu & replacing the mobo with another socket 7 mATX board for some reason I can't remember. No matter how hard Intel tried to kill it, everyone else treated it like a de-facto standard & it just became even MORE entrenched until PC-100 ram finally became too limiting (and expensive... from what I recall, 128mb of pc100 cost about 2-3x as much as 128mb of pc133 or DDR-1, to the point where you could pay for a new mobo with the ram savings alone).
Quick, who invented "the telephone"? Alexander Graham Bell? Nope. He was just a CEO with the connections & persistence to get approval to string wires over public right-of-ways. The 19th century's equivalent of today's Arduino & RasPi-using "Makers" had been sending sound over wires for YEARS. They were just unusable, impractical, or useless as commercial products.
Ditto for "electric light". Arc lights existed in France at least 50 years before Edison was born. What Edison "invented" was "the electric company" (and bulbs that could be affordably mass-produced & used by someone without the resources to buy, maintain, and operate his own dynamo).
"The Soviets" arguably have a strong partial claim to inventing cell phones... CDMA (which forms the basis of modern 3g and LTE) was invented by Leonid Kupriyanovich. In the SIXTIES, he built a CDMA phone that could fit in your pocket. In 1970, the Soviet Union arguably had better mobile telephone service than the US did (not as a consumer service, obviously... but IMTS in the US was a technological dead end with 5+ year waiting lists for service in NYC & LA).
The point is, "inventions" rarely happen in a vacuum. Someone invents new components, others find new ways to combine & use them, and others eventually figure out how to make money with them.
Another example: stadium-sized LED TVs. No great surprise... everyone with an EE degree in the 1970s knew you could build a big TV using red, green, and blue LEDs... the catch was, blue LEDs didn't exist commercially, and red LEDs were dim. Then blue LEDs existed, but were dim. Then they were bright, but cost $5 apiece... and you needed at least 16,000 of them to show a reasonable NTSC-resolution image. So, who truly "invented" the big LED tv? Sony was (AFAIK) first to sell one commercially, but as a concept, it was an inevitable no-brainer just waiting for the parts to become affordable.
DNA can only be used to exonerate, not convict. Law enforcement might use it to identify potential suspects for further scrutiny, but when it comes to a court & jury, the only thing DNA proves is that it either a) could not possibly have been you, or b) might have been someone related to you.
Three years ago, I had my DNA analyzed by 23andme. According to my raw SNP data, there's no evidence of the genes for delayed sleep phase disorder... but I unquestionably have it, and have since childhood (& probably before). I found seemingly blatant discrepancies in a few other reported SNPs that appear to diverge quite a bit from observed reality.
I can think of a few possibilities:
* Promethase incorrectly interpreted my raw data & reported SNPs with incorrect values.
* The lab didn't actually sequence those specific values... it reported them based on indirect markers elsewhere that didn't necessarily pan out in this case
* The sample was contaminated by the lab (unlikely?)
* The lab's test for the relevant SNP was inaccurate... or at least, a lot less precise than the raw results imply.
I'd like to eventually get my genome analyzed again... by a company that uses a different lab, with slightly different test... but reports the results in a form that can be directly compared (SNP-for-SNP) with the original (or at least, deterministically converted into equivalent SNP form) to find discrepancies & get an objective idea about the likely error rate for the first.
Any suggestions for whom to use for round 2?
Obligatory funny video to illustrate the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Part of the problem is that programming a car to safely drive autonomously on a limited-access freeway is ENORMOUSLY easier than programming a car to do the same thing on a "normal" road, unless the "normal" road is completely gridlocked & the car is just creeping along a few feet at a time.
High-speed (but non-limited-access) divided highways with grade crossings and pedestrians are still very much in the "experimental" zone when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
There are common situations where autonomous vehicles are at LEAST as safe overall as a real-world distracted driver (freeways, gridlocked city streets with stop-and-go traffic)... but expecting autonomous vehicles to safely drive themselves on high-speed suburban roads with pedestrians and cross-traffic is probably still a bit premature.
Texas has most of that space because it made a POINT of identifying future freeway corridors & bought up 200-300 feet of cheap ROW through the former hinterlands of Dallas, Houston, etc. way back in the 50s & 60s... so you'll find places where there are two 2-lane roads a block apart with literally NOTHING between them. As the traffic increases, the pair of 2-lane roads become a pair of one-way roads with 3 lanes apiece (functioning as a divided 6-lane highway with a HUGE grassy median). Eventually, Texas builds a new freeway in the middle, and the existing lanes become its frontage road.
Ergo, Texas can easily transform former country roads like SR-121 into full-blown freeways with minimal drama, in the time it would take Florida to buy half the necessary land at 4x the original estimated price, or for California to do 5 environmental impact studies so NIMBYs can find an excuse to kill the project.
Florida cities literally plan ahead for almost nothing... Orlando is LITTERED with aborted freeway stubs where they started building before owning the ROW, then had to back up and find a different path because in the meantime some developer was allowed to build something big & expensive directly in the planned path.
That's the single biggest difference between Florida & places like California, Texas, NY, etc... we start building things without an unambiguous & assured path to completion (or guaranteed funding to build it). Georgia seems to be as bad as Florida in that respect. NY & CA have their share of projects aborted due to public opposition, but neither state would EVER say, "here's where the freeway is going", then stupidly allow someone to build a 30-story tower in that direct path anyway.
#3. This.
In Miami, there are exits like SR-826 to NW 25th Street where you could literally spend 35 minutes from the moment you come to your first stop in the exit lanes (assuming it hasn't backed up all the way to the PREVIOUS on-ramp) until you've FINALLY turned left onto the road you're exiting to.
Another truly awful exit: southbound Turnpike to westbound Pines Blvd. In theory, it should be a breeze... a straightforward "exit and turn right". In reality, there's a right-turn traffic light (with no turn on red) on a stupid timer that isn't synchronized to ANYTHING & blindly turns green once every 8-10 minutes. At 6pm, it's useful... at 9pm, you're better off following the old ramp to the original exit & making a left turn, because THAT light cycles every 2 minutes. Broward has better roads than Dade, but does a shit job of synchronizing traffic-light timing. It fixes everything once, then lets it slide into entropy light by light for the next 5 years.
From what I've read, the big problem in Florida used to be the way road construction was funded. If a road had ${n} budgeted and a timeline of ${m} months, exactly ${n}/${m} would be doled out every month, regardless of what was actually being DONE that month. So contractors would put up barricades to show "due diligence", start cashing checks, then wait until enough subsequent checks were deposited to pay for the equipment they'd have to lease & the initial crew. From that point, the remainder of the project was a dance of keeping at least a few workers visibly working at all times, while postponing EXPENSIVE next steps until enough cash accrued to fund it. Thus, ANY "small" road project took exactly 24 months, a 2-to-4 lane project always took 48-60 months, and a major project always took 72-84 months.
In contrast, California did a better job of matching payments to project cash flow, so construction companies THERE could afford to do things that would be UNFATHOMABLE in Florida, like building all 4 major ramps of a new freeway interchange SIMULTANEOUSLY instead of one... by... one. Ergo, Caltrans could (re-)build an entire 34 mile freeway in the time FDOT took to add a second left-turn lane to an existing 4 or 6-lane road.
FDOT has gotten better than it used to be (to a large extent, thanks to changes driven by Jeb Bush, who had enough background in construction to know that FDOT's old strategy was bullshit), but we STILL aren't quite at the point of simultaneous flyover construction yet (allegedly, because there's a major shortage of suitable cranes are compared to California... Caltrans pays to keep extra crane capacity on hand & ready to deploy on a week's notice so it can act quickly after an earthquake, while FDOT still totally leaves it up to private companies making their own cost-benefit decisions... cheaper, but at the cost of agility & speed).
Texas got it right... you can't build your way out of congestion one new lane at a time. To make a visible difference in congestion, you have to PROFOUNDLY increase the capacity of the region's entire road network. Do it one piddling lane at a time, and your gains get instantly eaten up by induced demand. Rebuild every antique 6-lane freeway into 24 lanes (built "Texas-style" -- 6-8 lanes for traffic that's just driving through, 8-14 lanes for traffic going to or from the city, and another 6-8 lanes for cars getting on or off within the next 3-5 miles), grade-separate major thoroughfares, and ideally build a decent rail transit network at the same time & as part of the same project, and you can have a city where driving 10 miles at 7pm is almost as fast as driving 2 miles at noon.
Vector graphics were a cool, non-blocky alternative to low-res bitmaps, but a modern "4k" TV (or even 720p, for that matter) can render a smoother-looking line from a 24-bit anti-aliased bitmap than an Atari color vector CRT with .39mm dot pitch from Tempest EVER could. If anything, Tempest at 1280x720 looks TOO good... you need 2160x1440 or better to convincingly render in the alignment & shadow-mask artifacts seen in a REAL color vector display.
Google's alignment falls roughly into the triangular region bounded by "Chaotic Good", "Lawful Neutral", and "Neutral Neutral" (Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis, Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other, Neutral Neutral in the middle).
Even IF "Steamboat Willie" became public domain tomorrow, all that would REALLY mean is that you could scan & digitize the original & put it on Youtube without risking Disney's wrath. Attempting to create NEW works involving Mickey Mouse based upon Steamboat Willie would be nearly impossible... 99% of what we think of as canonical "Mickey Mouse" came LONG after Steamboat Willie, and the majority of it will be protected by trademark law as long as Disney's army of lawyers keep up with their paperwork.
Ditto, for Cinderella & Snow White. Yeah, the Grimm Brothers wrote the originals... but if you're American (or European, or otherwise grew up with Disney inextricably woven into your childhood's culture), probably 90% of what YOU think of as "Snow White" or "Cinderella" is REALLY "Disney's Snow White" or "Disney's Cinderella".
The "American Way" would be, "build an artificial island between the Pacific & SF Bay" and new port facilities somewhere on the "Pacific" side.
We're a nation of pioneers who CELEBRATE our triumphs over nature & revere those who made it possible. We've reversed the course of rivers, turned ephemeral sandbars into prime urban real estate, literally sliced away mountainsides to make room for new roads, and built a pipeline through 800 miles of frozen tundra without having it melt the permafrost & sink into the mud.
Compared to what we'll have to do to fortify the east coast, protecting SF Bay with a mile-long dike is almost child's play.
A guerrilla war by angry Nexus owners to associate "P" with "Poop" (and alternate mascot featuring the Android logo with a poop-emoji hat) as revenge for force-obsoleting still-fairly-new hardware by breaking kernel binary drivers without an official solution.
A few hundred developers doing it in every related blog & forum post they make, and within days Google searches will either be suggesting "Android Poop", or Google will have to tamper with search results to suppress it & risk bad press when they're caught.
Think it can't work? Google "Santorum".
Never underestimate the kind of guerrilla negative public relations campaign developers can do. "Regular" people might sigh & move on. Developers will latch on & become OBSESSED with it for months. Hopefully, Google's management knows this AND how easily it could neutralize that anger simply by informally releasing new kernel binaries for Nexus devices.
Google's decision to not support Nexus devices with an OTA update is semi-understandable, but it would be really nice of them to AT LEAST continue with kernels, compatible binary kernel modules built for proprietary peripherals in Nexus devices, and updates to Google's own apps (esp. Play Services & Play store) for another 3 years. Why? Because they're the only ones who CAN make new binaries for Nexus devices. Qualcomm lets THEM have access to source & reference drivers the rest of us will never be allowed to touch directly.
In other words, after the end of formal support, there should bs an additional 3 year period where they do what only THEY ALONE can, so we can do the rest ourselves (vis-a-vis AOSP).
(background: Unlike Windows, Linux makes NO effort to maintain binary driver compatibility between kernels. If you have the source, it's easy to just recompile old drivers for the new Kernel. If you DON'T have the source, you're fucked. Recompiling isn't necessarily HARD... often, it can be mostly automated. But Google has the source... we don't, and never will. So only THEY can do this for us.)