Tag: defensible times
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A clear view of exp vs linear
One basic fact about money is always understood by the plutocrats but never explained to the peasants. We hear inflation numbers or exchange rate numbers, and the influencers of “left” and “right” base their appeals on these fake numbers. Even the bitcoiners, who claim to be entirely outside government and banking, always treat official “inflation”…
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Geo vs Helio, Rectangular vs Polar
Since today is what used to be called Columbus Day, a couple of rehashes from 2014 or so… Hundred Flowers Toxic Sludge Factory #125, sometimes known for mysterious reasons as “Seattle”, has decided to get rid of Columbus Day and replace it with “Firstses Nationseses Indigenouseses Peopleseseses Days.” (Yous gots to haves lotses ofs excessesese…
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Farm electric was a BIG business
Following from the Delco vibrator mystery, perusing 32V farm power systems. I was mainly curious about the form of the outlets. Was there a special plug for 32VDC so regular 110VAC appliances couldn’t be plugged in, and vice versa? No. At that time the two-pronged outlet was still rare; most houses had nothing but screw-in…
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The techy president
Millard Fillmore is famously the non-famous non-descript nothing-much president. He deserves credit as an early adopter of tech. In 1851 he got the White House kitchen to adopt cookstoves instead of fireplaces. The cooks went on strike, fearing explosions or something, so he brought in tech advisors from the company that made the woodstoves, who…
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Fractal exploration
From the Twitter of Bitsavers, one of the Blessed Preservers of this world: Book that doesn’t exist that needs to: “The Fractal Geometry of Writing” The thought actually started out that whenever I start writing something, I end up going down ratholes that each turn into something that would end up being the length of…
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Reprint on “privacy”
Noticing more idiotic “concerns” that one agency or company might be accessing your private data. THIS IS FUCKING STUPID. Everyone who isn’t hopelessly bound up in partisan soap opera assumes that EVERYTHING IS PUBLIC ALL THE TIME. This isn’t specific to one agency or company, and it’s NOT NEW AT ALL. Only the shockedshocked is…
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When the S in ESG really meant something…
EnidBuzz featured the Failing company, and linked to a longer article at Okla Hist Soc. I always admired the deco architecture of the building, but had no real connection with the company or its drilling rigs. The commenters filled out the story. The company treated its workers well, and the founder’s family semi-retired into real…
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Morse is music
A column from Telegraph and Telephone Age in 1910. Morse is a way of speaking and hearing language, so it ‘logically’ should be processed in the same parts of the brain as spoken language. These 1910 observations indicate that Morse occupies the same areas as music. Experienced operators were not bothered at all by general…
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Strong stuff, weak history
Strong stuff from Kirn: So much imagination, eccentricity, dreaminess, and creativity went into the creation of the tech we use now. Yet it is becoming the instrument of our species’ most simplistic and brutal instincts for raw power, deception and coercion. Damn it, I want that Renaissance they promised! First part is wrong. The true…
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Natural beauty correlates with theft.
Still thinking about Bell Labs. I visited there once ‘on business’ when I was working in the acoustics lab at Penn State. I feasted my eyes on The First Transistor, which wasn’t under lock and key. It was just casually displayed in a glass case in the main hall. One of the Substackers wrote a…
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Reprint from 2016
In previous item I was bitching about modern podcasts failing to show the real balance of male and female in marriage. A similar change happened in drama and comedy, with a pivot point around 1960. Before the shift, spy shows and adventure shows had teams of men and women with everyone participating in appropriate ways.…
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Right for the wrong reasons
Governments are telling us recession is a good thing. Everyone, left and right, is bemoaning and mocking this “hypocrisy”. Truth: Recession is a good thing. The governments are speaking the truth for a multitude of false and evil reasons, but that doesn’t make it false. In culture and technology and economics and individual life, drunken…
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Not new
Kirn is musing on the arbitrary definitions of recession and inflation. The whole late 20th Century notion that your immediate experience is less reliable than information broadcast on electronic screens needs to be reconsidered. It was a case of mistaking science fiction for fact and stemmed from a kind of daft optimistic boom-times delirium. Well,…
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Clerihew Day
Well, actually yesterday was Clerihew Day. A new American Radio History upload from 1955 includes a couple of near-Clerihews. Like many large stations, KFI in Los Angeles sent out a weekly newsletter with a mix of recipes, articles about local affairs, and jokes and poems submitted by readers. Most of the jokes and poems were…
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Convergence is a big word
Kirn’s love for the Beats is misplaced, but his mention of the science-based conformity of the 50s is a solid and strong point. Conformity in a tech context means losing old information and old devices that were valid and functional. The scientific consensus of the ’50s was good on “climate” and excellent on viruses and…
Polistra's Mill 