athom

A friend of a friend building an airplane?

How about a flying saucer? https://enjoyer.com/an-alien-cult-built-a-spaceship-in-a-mic...

I first learned about this from a friend in Detroit, MI, who told me about it when he learned my mom grew up in that village. When I asked HER about it, she knew exactly who/what we were talking about. It was an interesting conversation.

Needless to say, this one remains firmly in the "started" category, but looks like it got closer to "finished" than one might likely expect.

Achievement Unlocked: Invent Skynet

Please, please, PLEASE tell us that stands for Peanut Butter and Jelly!

More seriously, how DID you wind up with those call letters? Do applicants get some say in the selection, or is it just whatever they give you?

I'll do you one better.

The first item returned by a search on "couch" is ABC-00927226, which "features a rectangular form resembling a couch, characterized by a solid, box-like structure." In other words: it's a box.

HOWEVER: We KNOW it's a COUCH, because: "One side prominently displays the word "COUCH" vertically, rendered in a bold, modern font."

It's BOLD! It's MODERN! It MUST be a "COUCH!"

In three decades of surfing the web, I've never encountered more than a couple of those error messages. This set of pictures makes me wish I'd run into them more often.

Ah, The Design of Everyday Things is a wonderful book, and the source of one of my favorite epithets:

It probably won an award.

The one I love is Microsoft's project manager, MS...

...wait for it...

...Project.

Was charged with managing a department-wide installation about fifteen years back, now. You want to have fun looking for relevant docs, try a search on "Microsoft Project". Good times!

I think the one exception to Microsoft's generic naming convention is Excel. Visio probably qualifies, too, but they bought that from someone else.

Oh, and I guess PowerPoint, too.

No kidding!

The FIRST thing that came to mind when I read that headline was Hofstadter's Contracrostapunctus in THAT book!

Check it out! Read it! And if you DON'T find the WHOLE hidden message, read it again, because it's spelled out RIGHT in the dialog!

Happy hunting!

Thank you for stepping in, Evan!

My original post was from work, and when I tried to find a reference, I was blocked from following any links! Think they recently instituted a policy...

So I finally do the lookup from home, and what do I find at the bottom of the first page, but a link to YOUR REPLY!

We're Google famous!

This reminds me SO much of Atari's "Graduate Computer" attachment for the 2600.

Unfortunately, I can't find an accessible link from where I am right now. Maybe when I get back home...

I first read about this back in the 1980s, in an issue of Science Digest. Couldn't find a link or reference on short notice, but here's something from the American Academy of Ophthalmology that explains the phenomenon, with an experiment to see the blood vessels in your eye:

https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/experiment-se...

Apparently, the brain tends to ignore visual stimuli that don't change over a short period of time, which allows you see "around" the blood vessels passing through the middle of your eye. By closing your eye, and moving a penlight around against your eyelid, you can make the vessels cast a shifting shadow on your retina that makes them visible.

The reason you usually see everything out in front of you is that various actions cause your eye to shift about just a little, just enough to cause the image on your retina to shift about enough for the brain to notice.

Easily defeated by arranging the images vertically.

Or at least, makes it a LITTLE bit harder.

Starting from March also sets up a neat pattern that can be used to generate accurate month/day values from day-of-year numbers, IF you number them from zero. You can also go back the other way.

March through July follow a simple two-month cycle of 31 days, followed by 30, repeating at May and July. August breaks the cycle with 31 days, but it essentially restarts, and runs a second five months before it breaks again, at January (the 11th month, since we started from March). The third run obviously runs out after February, ending prematurely, but this doesn't really break the cycle, either. You just restart again with March!

This allows you to write some (relatively) simple conversions using just a few divisors, along with some conversions from 1-based to 0-based numbering, and back. 153 days every five months, 61 every two, and of course 31 for a single month. Divide the remainder from each prior division by the next divisor, and the final remainder is your (0-based) day of the month. The month itself (taking 0 = March) is then the sum of each quotient multiplied by the associated count of months.

Reversing the process, I'll leave to the reader.

Kind of wish you could drop a list in there, and have it step through.

That's it.

If I EVER go so crazy as to buy one of THOSE trucks

the plate is going to read 'LOPOLY'

I don't even care who gets it, or doesn't.

My workplace doesn't even allow us to plug in (unapproved?) USB devices, so even this workaround likely wouldn't fly here.

If you DO start in March, your days/month fall into a neat little pattern:

Mar 31 - Aug 31 - Jan 31

Apr 30 - Sep 30 - Feb 28/29

May 31 - Oct 31

Jun 30 - Nov 30

Jul 31 - Dec 31

That highlights a few interesting cycles you can use to calculate dates from a simple count of days from the start of the year:

153 days every 5 months

61 days every 2

31 days per month

An "early reset" occurs every second month, jumping to the next 2-month cycle after the second day 30. Another occurs after every fifth month, jumping into a new 2-month cycle halfway through the last one of the 5-month. And of course, end of the year breaks the third "5-month" cycle WAY early, just before even its first 2-month is finished.

I won't try to detail the process of generating dates from this here, but I'm sure most of us here can work it out with just a little effort. Instead, here's a couple more fun facts to consider:

If you DO start the calendar from March, counting it as month 1, September (7) through December (10) map rather nicely to their own numeric positions. That seems a pretty strong hint, to me.

And I REALLY love this one:

The Gregorian cycle consists of four centuries. The first three are 36,524 days each: 100 years x 365 days + 24 days for the leap years. The hundredth year (ending in 00) is NOT considered a leap year, EXCEPT for every FOURTH hundredth. So that's 4 centuries * 36,524 days = 146,096, plus 1 more for the leap century, for 146,097.

That number is EXACTLY divisible by 7, which means the week cycle repeats WITH the Gregorian one. Good thing! Otherwise, we'd have to wait 2800 years!

Had a quick peek at the first couple of paragraphs, here.

And now, I want to go back and reread some of that turgid text!

You want to know what's REALLY bad? When the whole TOASTER pops up in your face!

Here's the deal: I maintain a boatload of Visual Basic (yeah, yeah) in Autodesk Inventor. That program REALLY wants to make sure you're saving regularly, so if there's a document open that's been changed and left unsaved for awhile, it pops up a notification. This is fine when you're working on the model, and you just see this "toast" popping up in the corner. You make a note of it, maybe divert to the save icon, and get right back to work.

On the other hand, if you happen to be using the VBA environment when Inventor decides you need a reminder, it absolutely insists on slapping ITS window over top of it, so it can notify you Right Now! That includes grabbing focus, of course, which leads to all sorts of fun when you're in the middle of typing, and suddenly find yourself starting You-Don't-Know-What-Command on the model.

Fun times.

So, yeah, "toasts" can get annoying, but grabbing focus... THAT's when the trouble starts.

The FUN part is, if you just happen to have the same name as one of the crew, you can get a credit without being involved at all!

Funny story: I usually sit through the full end credits when I go to the movies, just in case something interesting happens afterward. So I'm doing the usual thing at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog, and suddenly, there's MY REAL NAME jumping RIGHT out at me! It wasn't even on its own line, just in with a bunch of other folks working in the same group (I presume), but there it was, and I SPOTTED it!

Maybe it's just me, or maybe we just tend to take notice when our own names pop up, even in a crowd.

Anyone else have that experience?

Pretty sure my dad still has his. I still have memories of his working on our microbus at the time, back in the early '70s. Don't think I was even five, yet, but I remember lying underneath the thing with him, watching while he worked on the brakes(?). And another time, he and Mom working a couple of jacks to pull out the engine.

Yeah, that copy earned its keep. Think it still has some of the grime...

Related:

A Catalogue of Unfindable Objects, by Jacques Carelman https://www.amazon.com/Objets-Introuvables-Catalogue-Fantast...

Perhaps best known for his Coffee Pot for Masochists, featured on the cover of Don Norman's book, The Design of Everyday Things https://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expand...

Okay, at first, I was amused with the acronym's similarity to a certain Ford model that... didn't last too long on the market. I've snarked on things like this before, and been downvoted, likely for adding little else to the conversation, so I was going to give this one a miss.

Still, I was curious, so I fed it to the Duck, and got links like:

https://www.edsl.net/

https://www.insystechinc.com/edsl/

Not what was meant, I suspected, which is when I started this reply, and then remembered that other search site everyone seems to like. A search there finally brought up this:

https://wiki.c2.com/?EmbeddedDomainSpecificLanguage

which provided the answer I'm pretty sure I was seeking.

So, for all the rest of us less-enlightened visitors who might not actually know, I believe that EDSL (in this case) means:

Embedded Domain Specific Language

Point given for "write my own ERP software." I work with that stuff on a daily basis, and am actually thinking of trying just that.

Indeed. First I read of him were some of his articles on stuff he wouldn't work with. There's a passage in his article on dioxygen diflouride (AKA FOOF) that would sound delightfully wicked read in the voice John deLancie.

Brilliant writer!

I once had the pleasure of seeing Terry Pratchett speak, at the first Penguicon, near Detroit, MI. (Somewhen between 2006 and 2009, I think)

He told us, among other things, of working at a facility where they had to wear some sort of dosimeter, and were not allowed to leave the base without treatment if the card turned black, or something like that.

Then he mentioned one of the workers who turned up too hot to get IN to the base.

Turned out, he'd acquired some old aircraft instruments that used radium paint for nighttime visibility, and had been messing around with them.

Fun times!

Try looking up "pinkie pie party cannon"

My favorite part of this article is the liberal, and completely unironic scattering of the term 'OMG'.

That's weird. I remember learning AutoCAD back in the release 10 and 11 days. They used to have this "donut" command that would draw a 2D donut shape using a polyline with thickness, and just two points joined by arcs.

Now I think of it, I think I remember: it used two points, with arcs instead of line segments, and "closed" to get the second arc. I'm not sure if you could force the closing segment back to a straight one, but that could have probably got your "D" shape, if so.

You should look him up from about ten years prior to TNG. He was in several episodes of I, Claudius back in 1976, thereabouts, and aside from the hair, he STILL didn't look much different.