Category: Uncategorized
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Protecting against invasion
In these Paris street pictures from 1962, one thing stands out. ALL the cars and trucks are French. No exceptions. I don’t see any Fiats or VWs or American cars. Most are Renaults, with a mix of Peugeot and Citroen and Simca. Other Euro countries were more cosmopolitan at the time, even Germany and Italy…
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Ted Williams Casinos
Slot machines make sense in an addictive way. They function like any other addiction. You think you’re going to win, and you win pleasure just often enough to keep you pumping the coins in. Other traditional casino games and most physical addictions have a better payout, sometimes more than 50% of the coins; but the…
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Fessenden’s coherer
A few years ago I did some features on Coherers, including a test of a real coherer. Fessenden tried his hand at a different form of coherer. The usual coherer was a tube of powdered metal which cohered into a semi-solid and conducted more current when RF was applied. Coherers served as a sort of…
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Better name
Dams are failing in Tennessee. This is a straightforward result of spending all our money on war and destruction and NONE AT ALL on repairing or building. Year after year congress passes trillion-dollar appropriations for “infrastructure” but NONE of that money actually goes toward building or repairing. Most of it ends up in the pockets…
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Back to good old preversion
The antivaxers are returning to older forms of OCD craziness like fluoride. Suddenly fluoridation is a big menace again, just as it was from the ’50s until the ’90s. Childrens Health Defense, organized by the antivaxers, is pushing a lawsuit against fluoridation. Most of these OCD fads are essentially commercial, pushed by sellers of supplements…
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If “democracy” means…
If “democracy” means responding to the will of the people, then the Trump campaign is deeply anti-democratic. Before the start of this “election” season I was getting several spam emails per day from the Trump campaign and frequent spam from a few different Democrats, both presidential and congressional. I used AOL’s automatic unsubscribe feature on…
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Aphid Day 2024
Sept 28, 2024. Today’s temperature reached 86, and the weather bureau sees nothing but cool from here on. The aphids suddenly appeared at 3PM. Are they saying this is really the LAST hot day? I hope so. This summer has been WAY too long, and the combination of poor sleep and stress got my anxiety…
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The Sechometer
Polistra is cranking a strange little machine, and the galvanometer needle is wiggling in response. The mysterious little gadget is a sechometer, with an equally mysterious name. It was made by Leeds and Northrup, one of the two big lab equipment companies. I wrote a series of features on L&N in 2021. Allegedly the name…
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Common sense from courts
Bitcoin fraudsters always pretend their schemes are decentralized and uncontrolled. Two different courts applied common sense to this criminality. = = = = = First, Coinbase is trying to argue that DeFi networks are simply a form of speech, since they don’t have a central controller, so they don’t need to register as securities. Courts…
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Profit leads to sanity
Via Variety, Scripps-Howard is laying off a large part of its “journalists”, along with everyone else in the deservedly dying “news” biz. = = = = = START QUOTE: “Amidst an already difficult linear television advertising marketplace, many brands and agencies have decided that advertising around national news is just too risky for them given…
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50 years since the ONE EXCEPTION
This autumn is the 50th anniversary of the ONE TIME when congress responded to the will of the people. Allegedly the lower house is supposed to respond, but it never does. Just this ONE TIME. For the 1974 model year, NHTSA required cars to REFUSE TO START unless all seat belts were buckled around all…
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We’re supposed to waste our emotions
As usual we have dozens of overdoses every day, some fatal. There are two responses. Dark humor and caring. Dark humor is winning, as more and more people realize that caring is a fraud. Media and rulers want us to CARE about everything so they can feed our caring with solutions that make things worse.…
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Creative dream
I finally got enough sleep this morning, resulting in an interesting dream: I was reading a technical book and noticed that important words were underlined like href links in HTML. The words seemed to be thicker than the rest of the page, and when I pulled them out, each became a little reference card. The…
Polistra's Mill 