yetanotherloser

Squidgeware.

I like that. A nice generalisation.

I'd construct a sad caveat to this, but Randall Munroe did it better than I can already: https://xkcd.com/1683/

Not to solder, but to use a crimped connector - the good ones come with hot-glue-lined heat shrink so you crimp the wires for a great connection, then heat the connector and the shrink glues itself down, making a totally sealed connection.

If it's just low volt, low current, low mechanical stress stuff indoors - just twist and solder and wrap a bit of elec tape around it. But if it matters, break out the crimp tool.

ps good shout on the letters, which I had thoroughly forgotten. The d20s still are odd though.

Making a triangle or square or even hexagon with rule and compass is fairly easy. Making a really regular pentagon also only needs rule and compass, but noticeably more knowledge with them. Try it.

https://sciencevsmagic.net/geo/

That's interesting, I thought the case made for oracular use when I read about it was reasonable, but I may be a bit put of date. There was a fair bit of weird belief washing around in later Roman times before Christianity won out, though.

As for game rules - we have a tiny enough fraction of all non-elite-literary writing from antiquity that we probably wouldn't have a complete game's rules if they had been in the habit of writing them down - but we have so many surviving bits of writing that we ought to have fragments of rules. They seem rather thin on the ground, which leads me to suspect that written rules just didn't seem that important to most Romans. From Vindolanda to Oxyrhynchus they wrote bills and doggerel and love-life complaints and demands for new socks... but nothing at all that attempts to explain THAC0.

We don't even really know how they played Ludus Latrunculorum, despite finding quite a few sets and more boards - but there are several reconstructions from literary references. One of them I find quite engaging, so I hope it's on the right track.

re: being That Guy: I know. It's a weak "Romans were old school" joke.

I had that possibility in mind, yes :-)

Board games are much older than the Romans, though possibly not older than writing - and texts give us a bit of a clue that some early ones were part recreation part ceremonial. By Roman times pure recreational games were common and reasonably often referenced in their literature. They definitely used cubic dice with numbers on for games (and gambling). The icosahedral dice usually have Greek letters rather than numbers (occasionally symbols IIRC) which make them hard to move a piece to or compare scores; we don't seem to find them with game boards like we do "Latrunculi" counters; there's no textual support for a game with them (weak evidence, true) but there's a fair bit for strong interest in divination and oracles that could use them. So not a dead cert, but fairly likely for the D20s. Whereas when you find a Roman D6, you can be pretty sure it's for gaming and/or betting (or a thief's hit points).

If your DM had you use these icosahedrons for saves...

https://mymodernmet.com/roman-20-sided-icosahedron-dice/

then you really ARE old-school.

I like that theory too and offer a followon explanation: to make a dodecahedron you must make an accurate regular pentagon and this is not trivial with ancient geometric methods, you need to have learned a thing or two to get there. This makes it a better test than, say, an icosahedron. But we do know that the Roman empire wasn't completely unfamiliar with icosahedral dice, probably for a magical or divinatory purpose rather than determining whether your wizard made her saving throw.

An analogy to this "masterpiece" theory might be the industrial-age "Turner's cube" that demonstrates a pretty solid level of ability with a lathe.

Quite a lot of 25kV AC overhead in the UK. I'm sure it is possible to create a dangerous situation with those and a helium balloon, but it seems to be very rare. I don't think this is a real problem.

that has some weird parallels with modern military radar.

Also, I didn't want one when I read their marketing page, but now I'm intrigued.

There's a similar case in the US - Bridgeman vs Corel - that influenced the UK one. I don't think it forms a universal rule in the US, unlike the more recent UK ruling, but it is influential.

Hands. The general public's hands... clothes mark far less

There are also some heat treated modified timbers now which don't look like pressure treated sheds or fences but which are supposed to last well.

No questions, just want to say thanks for your amazing series of articles. I learned a lot from reading them.

Don't be bigoted against many-mouthed Shoggoths. Be pseudopod-positive.

I regret that I have but one upvote to give your post.

For you and, indeed, for me too. But, sadly, not for many people.

You get far more from the state as historical value than you would from the scrappy as bullion value. So, no, quite the opposite.

Don't be daft. The king is not the crown. Treasure items found in the UK are compulsory purchased by the state, not taken by the king. It's not a bad system in terms of practical results.

That is so much more than just patents. Vast engineering effort and process investment back up every "economy of scale". Unfortunately there is something about most e-ink designs so far that doesn't scale up in size very well. Really small ones are already cheap.

I've definitely met a lot of people who fail the GPT test.

To be honest, I think dynamic typing must contain a mind trap. Very smart people fall in.

Alert that can't be skipped? Un-ignorable hectoring about whatever they want you thinking about today, perhaps for political ends. Makes it even easier to turn warnings into mandates, and it's already too easy. Over-application, so everybody gets told to worry when actually it should have been more targeted. Mistakes, causing needless fear. The risk of triggering largescale panic... or creeping up the use from "only dire emergency" to "often enough that people learn to ignore it". Potential for it to be subverted to malicious ends by third parties.

What are the good uses of a nationwide, rather than local and targeted, alert?

Why do we think there needs to be such a system? I don't. I'd rather delete the capability. The likelihood of bad uses overwhelms the slender possible benefits.

Incidentally, in the UK the test messages could be opted out of, and a lot of people did. Presumably this doesn't stop the government from cranking the level up to unignorable if they wanted to, unless the big phone OS cos sensibly didn't give them that access level.

That's not very fair on clowns!

Every database you've ever benefited from was started by someone who didn't heed this advice!

That said, it's a hard job to do right and there are now databases of every different size made by people who are just much better than me.