Tag: Metrology
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Isms forbid solutions
Solving a problem can be divided into a few steps, with a loop on the last two. 1. Find the desired goal. This is the hard part and the genuinely variable part. In politics the right goal should be a functional civilization and a functional economy for ordinary people. 2. Know your baseline and measure…
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Quake preview? Maybe
According to SpokaneNews we had a little quake an hour ago at 10:25. I was sitting quietly doing graphics, no music or air conditioner, so I “should” have heard or sensed it, but didn’t sense anything. It was out west of Fairchild, and people south of there in Cheney and Medical Lake reported strong sounds…
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Just before audions
Found what seems to be the first electrical analog computer, or at least the first to be described as such. It’s in this 1909 physics journal. The Arthur Wright Electrical Device for evaluating Formulae and solving Equations wasn’t really a practical device and it wasn’t especially new. Wright was using modified versions of the Wheatstone…
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When Sailer writes what he knows
Sailer writes best when he writes about California. He lives there and PAYS ATTENTION to both current events and local history. He doesn’t blow up verb aspect by conflating permanent with temporary or vice versa. = = = = = START SAILER: In Los Angeles, Hurricane Hilary, the first since 1939, has been a summer…
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The Exeter clock
This is a quickie, just a graphics project to pull my mind through the recent hot spell. The Exeter Cathedral clock was built in the 1300s and remodeled around 1890. It’s a geocentric orrery with a 24-hour dial, numbered as two sequences of 12. It’s not a freestanding clock. I’ve mounted it on a flat…
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Natural clock?
After pondering the eightness of natural money, and the twoness and fourness of natural sleep, the concepts merged in my tired brainlet into a question. What if clocks were consistently binary? Our clocks inherited the quadrants of Roman ‘watches’, mixed with the 12s and 60s of the Babylonian system. As with money, we say the…
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There is no coffee in China???
TIL, as they say at Reddit. I’m always suspicious of ‘there are no X in Y’ sentences. Authoritative people have said There Are No Pianos In Japan, and There Are No Basements In Oklahoma. I can debunk the latter from experience, and the former is easily disproved by Yamaha with a long history of making…
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Pagebits
Dan Murrell does a highly detailed breakdown of the actors vs producers negotiations. One of the details was interesting to a metrology freak: Murrell says 5-4/8 is not a typo; all paychecks and contracts divide up scripts into eighths with no reduced fractions. 1/4 is 2/8, 1/2 is 4/8, and 3/4 is 6/8. Eighths have…
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Hypothesis
Denyse discusses an evocative and important question which is triggering new research: = = = = = START QUOTE: How can a person living with advanced dementia abruptly communicate in a clear manner? Many wonder what mechanism underlies this phenomenon and if it might be a key to mitigating—or even reversing—neurodegeneration. It’s also a mystery…
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Metaground
Kirn is getting credit for a brand new idea: In @palladiummag, a fascinating idea from @walterkirn that the spectacle of news, social media, changing mores, etc. is designed to prevent memory formation. Not new at all. This was the POINT of 1984. Room 101 was not about lies and propaganda, it was explicitly and obviously…
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Zenith’s hearing biz
Following on three previous Zenith items: Zenith receivers. Zenith’s Cobra-matic. The origin of the company. Zenith didn’t “belong” in the hearing business. Zenith had always built radio receivers and TV receivers. They added phonographs and clocks to their radios, but never branched out into audio systems or clocks. They never made instrumentation or lab equipment…
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Where isn’t the beef?
DailyMail has an article on the countries that eat the most vegies. The chart is hard to read, includes only the top 20, and is calibrated in kilograms per year. I’ve translated it into pounds per year per person, and included the top 100 broken up in 10s. This seems to be measuring the ‘color’…
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Recognize the tanh point.
Outrage! The Miss Universe pageant goes all the way on Woke. First, this is NOT NEW. The big beauty pageants stopped competing for real beauty and other human qualities a LONG TIME ago. Second, the same thing has happened in other forms of competition from athletics to spelling bees to casinos to business. Third, why…
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Reprint on confidence and immunity
Following on previous item, here’s a reprint from July 2020. This was before RFK took over ACU and guided it into the OPPOSITE form of panic. Were we being prepared for this fake emergency? The ACU’s own Youtube channel doesn’t have many of the press conferences, but it does have some useful interviews on the…
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