I brought this up to my ex over the course of our usual conversations

…

If we are weeks away from never being able to meet again

…🤔

At this point, they no longer obey the laws of classical physics, and the resulting quantum phenomena — known as relativistic effects…

This is…not how I would word things. Atomic physics is usually not in a classical (Newtonian) regime, and a quantum treatment is standard.

Adding relativistic effects to the quantum treatment is also standard, but many aspects of e.g. the hydrogen atom are reasonably well described without relativistic effects, though of course relativistic effects do matter.

Nitpicking aside, neat stuff!

After reading a few of these I feel like I was either a very boring grad student, or my professors were all very chill. (Or maybe just subject to male privilege.)

A few run-ins with IT, but I don’t think I ever got nasty letters from professors…

Obligatory jwz take on webp.

Well f2k me, T1L, t4s!

High frequency is generally bad for transmission line losses, so getting power from A to B is better at lower frequency — DC is a great option here.

If we switched to DC, many things would still flicker though as they would presumably use switching power supplies, but those could be relatively high frequency like you said.

Interestingly, airplanes use 400Hz, as transmission over distance doesn’t matter, and transformers can be made much smaller/lighter.

Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat would ask for various airplane specs (“what is the service ceiling of an F-4E?,” “what is the ferry range of a MiG-15?”), and you had to flip through a booklet to find the answer.

You could copy the book, but it was fairly long so I guess the friction kept you in check.

Never tried it, but hot peppers can be added to birdseed to prevent this — birds aren’t sensitive to capsaicin, so it only affects the mammals.

Gnarly PDEs aren’t exactly the same beast as differentiating single variable polynomials.

Sounds like this was basically the plot of the first Nolan Batman.

VNC? You have your choice of servers, and clients are ubiquitous.

A big gotcha is that you need to be careful with encryption/security, as in classic UNIX style VNC does one thing (remote desktops). It’s easy to forward over ssh though.

You can also use VNC to share, which is not what you want; this depends on the type of server/settings. But you can definitely create a new virtual X11 session and access it remotely.

In CA and we pay north of $40k in daycare alone for each kid.

Not a historian, but folks on The Internet have characterized the Soviet program as a series of milestones, with the US program a series of stepping stones in support of a single goal.

This makes sense with the cartoon, where the Soviets were first in basically everything except walking on the moon.

Not sure how much merit it has, but it’s kinda interesting.

Looks great! I’m a huge fan of (almost) never using a cutting board—that’s what the counter is for!

Boring conversation anyway.

Resistors.

Mac at work. Yabai+sketchybar is no i3wm replacement, but it works ok.

My .zshrc is basically the same as I use on my personal computers, and aside from a few coreutils differences it…kinda just works. I have apt aliased to brew so I can feel more at home.

Stock terminal works fine—I use xterm on Linux, so I’m used to relying on tmux for nice features anyway.

Basically, I miss the window manager, but practically speaking that’s a about it. (I obviously have xscreensaver installed!)

nc is useful. For example: if you have a disk image downloaded on computer A but want to write it to an SD card on computer B, you can run something like

user@B: nc -l 1234 | pv > /dev/$sdcard

And

user@A: nc B.local 1234 < /path/to/image.img

(I may have syntax messed up–also don’t transfer sensitive information this way!)

Similarly, no need to store a compressed file if you’re going to uncompress it as soon as you download it—just pipe wget or curl to tar or xz or whatever.

I once burnt a CD of a Linux ISO by wgeting directly to cdrecord. It was actually kinda useful because it was on a laptop that was running out of HD space. Luckily the University Internet was fast and the CD was successfully burnt :)

4*8 = 24

TIL ;)

Each /8 is 1/256th of all IPv4 addresses, not counting reserved/illegal addresses. Not sure where 1/1000 is coming from…

I’m a ~/tmp man myself.