Tag: Metrology
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Out of all the parks
Thomas Harrington hits all the balls out of all the parks with this article. He focuses on 1990 as the coup when the Bush family took over the world. Harrington also kicks the alleged “independents” who were “independent” on every issue until the NAZI TORTURERS bought them off. We’ll never know which of them were […]
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Booms and busts
An essayist at Medium gives us 12 quotes from Beat Generation philosopher Alan Watts. I read the piece to see if his selection was the same as mine. Nope, it was disjunct. He remembered and treasured the stuff that I had tossed aside as mystical drivel. I read Watts when I was about 14, and […]
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It’s all in the deltas
UD notes the death of Frank Drake, father of the Drake Equation estimating likely planets for intelligent life. Drake was working at the Green Bank Radio Telescope during the early days of radio astronomy, in the late 1950s, when he was inspired by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s famous 1959 paper in Nature about using […]
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Mother-in-law, cliff
Classic mixed feelings about this headline at Eurekalert: Exposure to past temperature variability may help forests cope with climate change On the one hand they’re still running the “climate” genocide. On the other hand they’ve finally accepted that Lamarck and Lysenko were mostly right and Darwin was mostly wrong. I’m going to take this as […]
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Latest Kirn quibble
Kirn’s latest pithy point: We need a few experts on the history of experts. Such a figure could estimate their average accuracy. My guess is that it hovers between 1 and 2 per cent. If it were any higher, we would not have needed new ones every few years. This is a beautiful observation about […]
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Big money, bad science
The title is gruesomely and torturously true of Big Science itself. No explanation needed. Oddly, the correlation also applies to radio and TV shows about science. Among discussion-type shows, the elite academic “roundtable” shows and elite quiz shows like Information Please generally spewed old worn-out cliches that had been disproved for many decades. The UFO […]
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Permitted concerns
Random thought about media vs experience. The current Officially Permitted Concern is inflation. Politicians and central banks are “responding” to the “public will” on inflation. Does this agree with my experience? No. I’ve never been bothered by inflation. In 1973-74 I was driving long distances for work and pleasure, and I wasn’t bothered by high […]
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What am I comparing with?
Lately I’ve been fussing about low quality and low quantity of online stuff. Substack is low quality and low quantity. Straight Arrow News is good quality but low quantity. What’s the baseline? What am I comparing them with? I’ve said that old newspapers and broadcasts had a much better mix of topics, a “substantial and […]
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Ockham, Machiavelli, Kernighan
Following on previous item with the simple advice DON’T PLAY. Watching the coiner idiots respond to the total collapse of their project is fun. Instead of running away, they continue arguing about PRECISE DETAILS AND PRECISE NUMBERS. Side A: This is an opportunity to 12.59347% short XTJIOERJY and long 36.78946859% UUEYHHGNOTC. Side B: No, FUD […]
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It’s all in the baseline
MindMatters nicely handles Jeffrey Tucker’s confused and incomplete realization. Tucker admits that information was useless, but he still takes the aristocratic side, treating peasants as dumb cowardly beasts. MindMatters (probably Denyse but not bylined) gives Tucker a healthy kick. I’ve gone through the same process of realization, starting from a different baseline and with a […]
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Zen doesn’t cut it
Substack’s leader McKenzie tweeted: I’ve seen a bunch of writers on Substack become millionaires from subscriptions now. Lots of half-millionaires too. It’s thrilling to me. When we started this company, “Writers are getting rich” wasn’t a trend. Most respondents were unhappy with the vagueness. If you’re going to talk about money you need to be […]
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All the fine old swindles
I enjoy watching the bitcoin idiots “rediscover” and fall for all the old scams. A bitcoin thingy called Solana made a big deal of keeping perfectly accurate time “on the chain”, which is obviously necessary because obviously there are no other clocks in the world. Just like grasshoppers are the only living things that can […]
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Metrology day 2022, AI version
Today is Metrology Day, but I’m trying to go for Entertainment and Enjoyment this year, so here’s a gathering of AI-generated nonsense from CookingFlavr.com. Is A Meter Long? A meter is a unit of length that is used to measure the distance between two points. The meter is also used as a unit of weight. […]
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Amazing graph
Cited by Batya, this is an AMAZING graph. It’s the percent of NYTimes headlines occupied by each president from Wilson through Biden. Most of the chart is rational and expectable. Presidents who made more news (wars, depressions, scandals) got more headlines. Unexpectedly there’s not much D vs R difference**. Aside from the regularity, the chart […]
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Keinpeilempfänger
Fifth in a vaguely defined series on obscure secret electronics, after SCR-268 and Tenzor and Peilempfänger and Kleinstpeilempfänger. = = = = = American Radio Library has uploaded new issues of the British Post Office Engineering Journal. Why did the GPO have an engineering research facility? Because the GPO managed ALL communication in Britain. It […]
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