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Interesting set of podcasts
These audio programs from the Beatrice Institute are EXTREMELY Christian, but interesting anyway. The series deals with the conflict between modern shit (social media, AI, tech, etc) and human souls. Unlike most, this series deliberately approaches the conflict from a WIDE variety of perspectives, many of them unexpected and fresh.
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Economics as a verb (reprint)
Reprint from 2012. = = = = = In any area you examine, our current idiocy stems from the fallacy of reification. In some cases we think of a word as being reality; in others we think of a number as being reality; in others we think of an arbitrary unit of measure as being […]
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More verb vs noun
Here’s another relatively unimportant puzzle that can be untangled by thinking of verbs vs nouns. One of Bitcoin’s fake advantages is that it’s allegedly fungible. Every digital token is identical to all other digital tokens, so you can’t tell who owns this particular token. The analogy is coins vs dollar bills. Coins don’t have serial […]
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Why does red sometimes turn black?
Halfway continuing from yesterday’s rant on facts vs commands. There’s one big unanswered question, directly relevant to Batya’s complaint. Why do the demons SOMETIMES let the truth out after the lie has killed enough people? The current example is the relatively unimportant story about Hunter Biden’s Ukraine connections. The facts were actually found and checked […]
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Say the black, do the red (reprint)
Batya is missing the point, intentionally or not: No admission that they got it wrong. No analysis of why. No discussion of how they demonized and silenced people who turned out to be right. Just gaslighting and distraction and a new topic for everyone to dance in lockstep to. It’s ok to be wrong. Everyone […]
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Mouse countries
In human hierarchies and in national hierarchies, you have to KNOW YOUR PLACE. Status is innate and permanent among humans and among countries. When you’re the mouse, you have to avoid pissing off the nearest cat. Eastern Europe traditionally understood its mousy position, stuck between Germany and Russia. Those countries ALSO understood that America and […]
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NOTHING.NEW under the sun
Still thinking about trite non-info vs new info… American Radio Library has added a section for the Western Union tech journal. Trite: I’ve said this a hundred times. The HTML web is just the latest and NOT the greatest incarnation of data webs. Formalized data webs started with Chappe’s mechanical semaphores, then the electrical telegraph […]
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Opposite of news
In previous item I made a note about my attempt to favor information and avoid repeating the repeated. This shouldn’t be strange; this is exactly what our nervous system does at all levels. Find and focus on the new and unusual. The old definitions of news were also natural. The word itself is just a […]
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It’s Pi Day!
Polistra and Happystar celebrate National Pi Day with a formal proof! = = = = = Sidenote: After this I posted a sort of followup to the Phlogiston item with some old info about eclipses that struck me as an interesting ‘debunk’. After more thinking, I realized it wasn’t interesting and didn’t disprove any conventional […]
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Constants and variables 171
On 3/11/2022 Obersturmbannführer Inslee started another brief reprieve from ballgags. Finishing the current two-year contract, 3/11 to 3/11. It doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, because the buses are still strangling me, and the stores weren’t enforcing the rule. The change does allow a better measurement of public insanity. Previously, Obersturmbannführer Inslee gave us […]
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Phlogiston wasn’t stupid at all
I hope Google doesn’t start censoring its Books department. All VALID ideas and CORRECT facts were written before the 20th century. Pretty much everything written since 1906 is either trivial or intentionally murderously false. Censoring new ideas is usually a net gain of real knowledge, whether the new ideas are ‘establishment’ or ‘independent’. Before Googlebooks, […]
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When industries submerge
This British Youtuber covers some of the same old tech areas that I cover, with the same general attitude. He doesn’t go as far back in time, but he goes much deeper than I do. In this clip he tells about the mysterious re-emergence of tape cassettes in recent years. How did they get underway […]
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New GenRad toy, 1/2
I started collecting GenRad equipment as a sort of tribute to proper analog measurement, and as a specific apology to GenRad itself for favoring Bruel & Kjaer during my time in academia. GenRad equipment was solid, rugged, easy to handle. BK was Danish, with the typical Kraut qualities. More precise than anything else under precise […]
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New GenRad toy 2/2
Last year I bought an incomplete GenRad octave analyzer, as part of my overall move back to analog stuff. This machine is especially rare and useful, so it’s worth fixing. The microphone is missing, and I’ve been watching Ebay since then, hoping to grab up the mic or another ‘parts car’. So far no mic, […]
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Nature wants us to match wits
Via UncommonDescent, a spider develops fiendishly clever strategies for catching and eating another spider. One group of jumping spiders, Portia, lures female spiders of another species (Eurytattus) to their deaths by mimicking the way a courting male spider shakes her nest and then attacking. They also attack web-building spiders by mimicking the tug on the […]
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