Tag: defensible times
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Most don’t know
Headline in Spokane News: Possible ammonia leak at the Ice Ribbon, Haz Mat Full Response to 700 West Spokane Falls Blvd. Industrial ice uses either ammonia or CO2. Ammonia is NASTY stuff. One whiff can ruin your sense of smell permanently, and a larger sniff can kill you. CO2 is nice stuff. It feeds plants.…
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Truth in advertising
Auto writers uniformly say that Ford made a big mistake by emphasizing safety in ’56. Nobody wants safety! First, Ford wasn’t alone in the “mistake”. Everyone started offering seat belts and padded dashes in ’56. Imperial and Chrysler had standard padding since ’49. Second, it’s simply not true that everyone hates safety. Real men are…
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What the web lost
Yesterday I was discussing the web’s GAIN of available information compared to the pre-digital age. There are also LOSSES in functionality compared to the digital pre-web era. Today’s courseware work reminds me again of what we lost when programs switched from Windows to the web. The text’s author wants me to bring back part of…
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Universal facts
One of the AFL-CIO booster films sympathizes with unionized postal workers. Carriers got up routinely at 4AM to start their sorting before walking the route. The narrator said “Nobody wants to get up at 4AM!” That was the official universal FACT for many decades as seen on TV and books and movies. People got up…
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When you’re the mouse (2021 reprint)
Linked in previous item on Columbia University vs ElonTrump. This overlong piece was written in 2021 at the height of Trump’s PREVIOUS monstrosity. One thing has changed for the better. At that time the Weather Bureau was still doing the wrong thing, hammering Gaia and losing the trust of the people. Since then they’ve figured…
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Was it time or space?
Thinking again about trust. A definite change happened in the early 80s. I don’t have enough ‘control variables’ to determine if this was a matter of national culture change or location. It could easily be culture by location, not culture by time. With that giant disclaimer, here’s the observation. In the ’70s, employers trusted me…
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Happy Blogday 20!
This month is the 20th anniversary of Polistra’s Mill. In the earlier years I marked each anniversary. The first entry was dated March 1, 2005. I started writing at Blogspot on March 14, and imported the previous two weeks from a brief attempt at blogging on LiveJournal. The tenth year seems to be the last…
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Nash trivia
1. Nash built 4wd vehicles three separate times. First from 1916 to 1920. When Charles Nash bought Jeffery to start his own company, Jeffery’s best-selling product was the unique Quad truck, with 4wd and 4-wheel steering. The military bought plenty of them for WW1, and Nash kept production going under his own name until the…
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Today is Debunking Day
Debunking Day is clearly designed by the “fact-checkers” like Snopes, who check facts in the same way that a chess player checks an opponent. They “correct misinformation” in the same way that Sprenger and Kremer corrected witches. Here’s a more honest salute to the day. Several years ago I did a comprehensive debunk of the…
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We weren’t always stupid
I was skimming through some 1966 RCA periodicals at American Radio Library just for jollies. RCA was demonstrating a fancy time and temperature screen generated by one of those newfangled Electric Brains: Ping! That’s KHQ in Spokane! Nah, impossible. The last time I watched broadcast TV was 2010. They couldn’t have been using the same…
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What we lost
In previous item I focused on our loss of innovation and flexibility after we switched to all finance and all monopoly. China and Russia didn’t make the switch, so they continued working with LIMITED RESOURCES. Now they’ve beaten our stupid MAX-FINANCE and MAX-THEFT approach to AI, with a technique that can run on normal computers…
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Reprint again on Russian tech
Apparently China has busted our idiotic monopoly on job-destroying AI, which might bust the AI stock bubble. The bubble was bound to pop anyway, and some observers thought it would pop soon. All stock bubbles pop when the inflators want to cash out. Of course the Chinese effort might not live up to its claims;…
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Bad future?
One of the industry films in my bedtime playlist (probably from 1955) cites stats about the power of the auto industry. One out of seven Americans worked directly for car makers or their suppliers, and another two out of seven depended completely on cars and trucks. Most of these films tried to extrapolate current stats…
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Satisfying metaphor
A dream this morning formed a metaphor. I had finished one piece of a courseware project … [this is true, not a metaphor] … and told the maid to send out the result. [THE MAID? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? I’VE NEVER HAD A MAID!] Later I checked the mailbox and saw that the maid…
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Materials and Methods
Following on previous item that mentioned the primacy of MATERIALS and METHODS. I’ve hammered this subject repeatedly. Here’s one of the better hammers from 2014. = = = = = START 2014 REPRINT: Reading another stupid “study” on improving nutrition, it struck me that Portion and Serving are extremely peculiar units. They are new instances…
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