jws

I may have blown the math, but the last time I calculated I figured there were about 35 Starlink satellites above the horizon at my latitude. Looking into the suburban early night sky I see zero, one, or two satellites with about equal probability.

I think the hypothesis this leads to is that the "don't shine" techniques Starlink is using are working. I'm guessing the ones I see are either not Starlink or are Starlinks transitioning to their working orbit (they don't do full "dark mode" until they are in place.) If in place units shown I'd see a lot more.

So at least, maybe it won't all be gloom and doom. But if it is all gloom, at least it will have little sparkles floating around it.

Just a note, if you want a special whimsical typeface, there are any number of talented folk on fiverr and similar that will make you one. Well worth it. For the cost of a lunch I got this turned into a font that I really like…

"Imagine an advanced alien race of octopus-like creatures who don't use writing. They encounter humans, enslave some and take them on their spaceships, but find they have to label things for the humans to read. Make me a font that is how these creatures would approximate our writing systems by miming the letters with their tentacles."

It's a glorious sinuous typeface which I use for labeling drawers and bins in my semi-industrial space.

You deserve your own personal typeface.

It sounds like this corresponds to an atmospheric contraction. They are lowering to avoid extending the lifetime of possible debris, but that also probably means the regular lifetime is not shortened. They are just staying in the designed density to match their designed service lives. The field of view of the satellites will be reduced, but presumably they have enough units up there to maintain full coverage.

This is distinct from the FCC application they have made for another Starlink shell in VLEO (~330km) for another 15000 satellites to better serve cellular phones.

At 45°N latitude, I keep mine nearly vertical year round. I used to adjust them 4 times a year for more optimal production. There are issues beyond angle of incidence. Being nearly vertical keeps the snow off in the winter. In the summer it reduces the cleaning required (it's a sea bird rookery, so that's kind of a lot). Beyond that, the telemetry needs are constant year round so if the panels can cover the needs in the winter, then summer is no problem.

My current strategy for small installations when you have an equator facing wall or fence is slap the panels on it and be done with it.

I dried three red oak trees using a dehumidifier kiln. ( 4'x4'x16' 1" pink insulation foam box assembled with packing tape with a household dehumidifier and fan inside. Very low tech. Knock it down when not using it.)

The process is mostly: measure moisture content of wood, pick a humidity to maintain, check wood periodically to see if it is drying too fast or too slow. Weigh water coming out to monitor process.

Very low effort if you have space to allocate while in use. The wood came out well, no complaints.

One downside is you won't kill insects with heat, so you could have trouble if it is buggy wood.

Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.

Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.

Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.

Don't be boring. A quick triage with an AI and a spot check suggest that the guitar solo at the end of Hotel California has just about the right number of notes (depending on how many '7' you get).

Sweet Child of Mine probably works.

Comfortably Numb(ber) allegedly works, but I doubt any of the singers I have access to can enunciate fast enough. For the most relaxed of the options, it has amazing little clouds of fast notes.

MUST RESIST: this is worse than waking up to a Saturday morning "Nerd Sniping", I could lose the whole weekend to this… I'll bet Nate isn't busy… With him and the girls from (redacted) Bohemian Rhapsody could work…

UPDATE: There goes the weekend. So far I've been in a fight with ChatGPT about counting syllables in copyrighted lyrics where I ended up suggesting it get help for its obvious emotional trauma at the hands of an IP lawyer and lined up 5 singers. "enjoy the ride" has beaten "they are just intrusive thoughts".

Probably because you don't find a list from the EPA.

The two categories are very similar, they are sort of aimed at the same result but have slightly different criteria. e.g. the EPA considers exposure levels, IARC requires at least some human evidence. So you wouldn't say one is stricter than the other, just different ways of skinning a cat.

For the EPA, "likely carcinogen" means:

• There is evidence of carcinogenicity in animals. (Multiple, consistent studies)

• The substance is shown to directly or indirectly cause chromosomal damage or mutations in a way that is relevant to humans.

• There are no or limited human studies, they are inconclusive, or otherwise inadequate. ((Note: This is sort of a "Why isn't this classified higher?" factor.)). ((If a substance isn't in widespread use, it is kind of hard to design an ethical human study. I mean, you aren't going to have some of your test subjects drink a bunch of likely carcinogen each morning.))

So this is a a classification for "Let's maybe not go nuts with this stuff, and someone really ought to check this out. And if you plan to ship tons of this stuff you might want to talk to your lawyers and lawsuit judgement mitigation team."

I didn't manage to find an exhaustive list of things the EPA has listed with this, but I found one that included higher risks as well, and in my little warehouse/workshop I identified 8 things at a casual glance that I have in inventory or generate. Proper use of these have minimal exposure to my squishy bits for most of them, and the others a well informed user should know to take adequate precautions. (e.g. "wood dust": wear a respirator)

The US does not currently fund the EPA to commission studies to further investigate likely carcinogens, so they stay on the list for ages.

Does one not suppose that a fair bit of this is the trial and starter doses that they give to doctors? Surely the drug company values them at list price for purposes of a business expense.

Another interesting variant of "annotations are the star" is "But What of Earth?" by Piers Anthony. It's an old school sort of sci fi story, but the publisher rewrote it in the publishing process. Eventually Anthony got the rights back and published the first draft with the editor's changes and his commentary on it. I think it was intended to be commentary on the publishing business, but as a way of knowing an author, you come away feeling like you know the guy in a way you don't get from carefully crafted stories.

It's one of those old paperbacks I know I wouldn't have tossed, but darned if I can find my copy to reread. Maybe I loaned it and it found a new home. Maybe you have it.

(Do remember, he is a 55 year old man writing this in the '80s. Some of his world view is… archaic?… in the greater society today.)

You want the Tor version from 1989, not the Laser version from 1976.

I'm not sure "bad" is required.

As a person responsible for maintaining a harbor in Lake Michigan, I am allowed to move 1 cubic yard of material a year, by hand, with a shovel (last time I checked, the rules change). Anything else requires a detailed permitting process with lots of limitations on what is even possible.

You are looking at a body of rules built up to prevent draining large wetlands without permission, destroying your neighbors waterfront, dredging huge plumes of PCB contaminated sediment into the active water zones, wiping out a regional spawning bed, or casting an intermittent shadow on a patch of lake bed of the great state of redacted. This is administered by a staff who will be held accountable for unforeseen damage and has limited resources.

So you do the paperwork, wait for your permits, only work during the weeks of the year when work is allowed, and try to generally make do with less than you wanted.

I went to the Hertz used car site and couldn't find anything close to the $17k in the screenshots used for all those news articles. They are mostly around $30k.

I married into toaster moguls. When they sold out in '97, domestic toasters had been infeasible for years already. And this was for a company where all the knowledge, equipment, and facilities had beed paid for many decades before. (They invented the electric pop-up toaster for certain definitions of electric pop-up toaster.)

Toasters are refined brilliance, if done right. The concept of "done" is computed using an analog computer programmed by human experts. (Ok, its usually a bimetal strip but it is placed so that the cooling of the moist bread keeps it from going off and your lighter-darker input is biasing when it considers the toast done.)

Tear apart some toasters. There won't be anything in a modern cheap toaster that isn't absolutely required. Ask yourself why everything is the way it is.

Research the UL requirements. I have the corporate 2 pound copper ball that had to be dropped on things from prescribed heights and not cause malfunction. Make sure you can hit this targets with what you think you can build. Also check the CE, they might have more modern rules.

Be ready for litigation. Toasters catch fire. The toaster moguls were horrified whenever they saw someone's toaster under a cabinet. Decades after selling the business they were still being sued by mesothelioma suits for things like a repairman that got lung cancer and repaired home appliances, so he probably might have worked on one of their 1920's models with asbestos insulation. Don't let it stop you, but put the backup insurance into the expenses.

"Funny" regulatory story on those. They are not legal in the US since the regulators decided they were fire extinguishers and then compared them to the rules for fire extinguishers. They noted the lack of a nozzle, gauge, and locking device and proclaimed them out of compliance. They also noted that there are fires the balls do not put out, which to be fair, is kind of true for everything except the heat death of the universe.

It's a shame. It would probably be a good thing to keep over a domestic laser cutter or 3d printer.

Do people in the UK use cash? I was in London for a week before I finally needed to get some cash to pay for a contractor for illegal services (a forbidden historical tour), later I needed coins to do laundry and the convenience store didn't have enough for a load of wash and a dry, he changed enough for a wash and the pub across the street had enough for a dry.

Around here folk call it the "Three D" strategy. Delay, deny, die.

If the insurance company can put off your procedure long enough you might die and then they don't have to pay for it. Family friend who has lost so much hearing he can't participate in conversations anymore has been strung out for 6 months by his insurance on a cochlear implant. The final hurdle was them denying because of incomplete paperwork, that they did indeed have said paperwork which was part of the initial submission.

If Americans find this unacceptable, they will need to adjust the laws to change the incentives to the insurance companies.

For me it is still airflow noise. I can’t really hear my compressors. But this is one of those blind men and elephant things. If you live in detached housing with space between houses and at least some attention to noise mitigation it is a complete non-issue. When I live in a single room with a heat pump inside with me, it is a huge issue.

Best case, they get to test the new sound dampening, armored pad, armored pad cooling, igniting all the engines on the pad, booster launch, staging, booster fly back, booster descent, booster landing (though not on anything solid). If that works they have a booster floating in the Gulf of Mexico they need to clean up.

For Starship they get to test staging, engine in vacuum, bellyflop control from very high altitude to sea level. Apparently all the way to sea level. They do not appear to be planning the reignition and flip. They may set the record for "most powerful bellyflop".

All the excitement is in the first 9 minutes of the flight. A little over an hour later the Starship's "orbit" will intersect too much atmosphere and will re-enter for about 12 minutes.

As for why not to try landing the Starship on water, I think they'll play with all their available fuel mass in vacuum. Those engines haven't operated there yet.

It looks like the patent the court found infringed is EP2575366 https://patents.google.com/patent/EP2575366B1/en

"Signaling of coding unit prediction and prediction unit partition mode for video coding" which ridiculously oversimplified to near uselessness is encoding video using a single binary tree to select from different possible encodings of P and B frames?

I wonder if it is possible to encode HEVC without using this technique and it was just that Netflix's encoders used it, or is this integral to all HEVC. (Broadcom has had lots of discovery in the US version of this lawsuit, so they could know which products and devices Netflix uses to encode their video.)

And just for a scope of the number of patents out there whose owners claim are relevant to HEVC…

The MPEG-LA patent pool has about 10000 applicable patents for HEVC and licenses for $0.20 per device.

ATT, Motorola, Nokia, and Microsoft refused to join MPEG-LA and made their own 500 patent pool covering HEVC and charge $2/device + 0.5% of revenue from streaming.

Then there are the wildcard gamblers like Broadcom - not a pool member and swooping in with patents designed to be infringed by HEVC implementors which even indicate in the patent that the inventors were aware of the internals of the as yet unreleased HEVC standard.

The DOJ wants them to allow electronic submission of applications to PERM jobs and to publish these jobs anywhere they publish other jobs. Apple agreed to this and to train their relevant employees about the issue for three years.

The article doesn't come right out and say it, but the case seems to have turned on PERM jobs being only available when there isn't a citizen/refugee/permanent-resident available to fill the position and that applying in paper was an unreasonable hurdle to these classes and that the positions should be advertised as widely as other jobs to ensure they aren't missing potential protected class workers who might like to apply.

The early DEC terminals did not reflow on switching.

I've written ANSI terminal handling before. The original VT100 paper manual that came with the terminal is a nice start, because the complexity hadn't really happened yet and people used to write useful documentation. With that as a starting point for understanding it isn't hard to extend into handling the full spec.

That diagram you linked is actually quite nice, but visually intimidating. If you think of it as a handful of regular expressions exploded into a state diagram that helps. For instance, the entire left half of the diagram is just the CSI code acceptor, see "CSI (Control Sequence Introducer) sequences" on the "ANSI escape code" wikipedia page.

You can write a regular expression to match a CSI and carry on. This is 2023 and you aren't using an 8080 with 3k of RAM. (probably) The only tiny trick is that you have to handle the "incomplete trailing regex" and wait for more data to arrive and try again.

As for handling reflow. I wouldn't call that an "implementation" problem. I'd call it a "specification" problem. I'd approach it by seeing what Apple's Terminal program does, write that down, and call that my specification.

Unfortunately, reading the code would be a felony for me. I sort of feel that if Apple makes it a felony for me to do the obvious and fully sufficient thing, then maybe they need to pick up the slack they created.

Great! Let's have a year of no new developer features and everyone sits down and documents the existing code. And not just "Peter the intern no one wants" typing in "This sets the density." as a comment for a function parameter named "density".

Bring in people with expertise, buy outside expertise where you can, focus on the product you actually want instead of the product that will appeal to every possible use case for every possible customer that the chip marketing team can imagine, don't sweat where you can put the margin line between chip and system integrator, because they are both you.

I suspect any $2,600,000,000,000 company could pull it off, if they moved first.

I recommend https://www.grenadachocolate.com (though I haven't had one since hurricane Ivan) Some folks ideally named for making an organic chocolate company (Green, Brown, and Browne) decided that the cocoa farmers of Grenada would be better off if they also made chocolate there. The climate makes it a bit of challenge, and small batch is hard to begin with, but they make a great bar that I always feel is more like cocoa made into a food than a product containing cocoa.

It's a small company with poor global distribution because, well, it's a big planet and there are only so many chocolate bars. But if you look at the web site, and find "view, retail outlets" and then click on "Country" to reverse search, US is now visible for some reason and San Francisco has a lot of outlets and they are near the top of the results. New York also seems to have a lot of outlets. I'm 500 miles from the nearest outlet.

But, if you want more money to go to people closer to the dirt in the production chain, these are your guys.

Also, "broad reach" would like a word with lfnoise. (It's complicated.)

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/186515/why-is-a-...

Yes. AirTags which are separated from their owner beep unless they are in a designated “ok to be left here” location.

I had one pointed east at the horizon the show a lighthouse a mile away using an old spotting scope. Worked ok until the sun made its way around to rise in frame. Now everything is greenish. I think with sufficient magnification you can cook your color filters or maybe the sensor wells under the filters.