For wj more than anything...
Got the first toy version of my nonlinear "flattening" software running. Here's the input image I've been using for testing. It's a picture (converted to grayscale) of one of my old work notebooks. The notebook is "curled" in three-space and the camera is: (a) not centered over the notebook; (b) rotated relative to the notebook; and (c) not pointed at the center of the notebook. Here's the output from the toy software. It's an approximation of a scan at a bit under 300 dpi. In the current version I give the toy hints about where the corners are, but then it's on its own. There are errors in the area where the curvature is most extreme. OTOH, in real life such areas are likely to be empty. I'm not unhappy with the result here.
Lots of future work on illumination correction, among other things.
My new pillow arrived today.
What sort of pillow? Decades ago now I was waking up with neck pains and bought a buckwheat hull pillow. The common complaint from people who feel it is "But it's so hard." The first time I tried it I sort of wiggled my head into it and got as far as thinking, "Yes, it seems rather..." before I fell asleep. Still using one, with no neck pain for years. All anecdotal endorsements are suspect, of course.
Sympathies to all the people with health concerns.
My sister's doctors are muttering about another joint rebuild/replacement. If you looked at our respective histories, I'm the one you would expect to have torn up/worn out joints and be getting replacements. But she's the one who has had two knees, a hip, and a shoulder replaced, and an ankle rebuilt. She's talking about having a couple of arthritic knuckles frozen, while all my hand/finger joints are fine. I sometimes doubt that karma payback is a thing, because I don't deserve the joints I've been blessed with.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done. http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
Sure, but don't hold your breath. I have a long list of things that "mostly together" will require.
As we've gotten around to archives...
TL;DR version: I've started playing with a toy version of the beginnings of software that will eventually be a tool for my archival project. In a couple of years it ought to be interesting :^)
I'm starting to play with toy versions of software I'll be using eventually in my role as extended family archivist building a digitized record from the hundreds/thousands of pictures and document pages that have accumulated. Everything I'm doing right now is grayscale, just so that's not a surprise to anyone who goes so far as to look at the images. Most of the images are large; you'll have to do whatever tricks your browser requires to see them at full resolution.
Text documents first. A JPEG image of a document page I snapped with my iPad is here. The original image is somewhat sharper than the one shown, since JPEG is not as good with details as Apple's HEIC format. For the time being, I use ImageMagick to convert HEICs to uncompressed grayscale.
Right now the toy assumes the document is a rectangle laying flat, and I'm taking a picture of it that's out of alignment. That makes it a linear transform problem. First step is to find the corners of the document. I'm doing something not entirely simple minded. The accuracy of the toy corner-finding code is illustrated here.
It's been a long time since I did anything with linear transforms and the matrix calculations that go with that. After some online reading to refresh my memory, and finding simple versions of code for 3x3 matrices, the toy code can do a perspective transform and produce an approximate equivalent of a 300 dot-per-inch scan (or more, or less). The page in the picture is actually a pile of several sheets, stapled, so doesn't quit meet the flat rectangle assumption. The result is shown here.
In some cases, I will want to do OCR on the images. I'm using the tesseract open-source OCR program for now. Tesseract is not a toy. When I converted the photo to an estimated 600 dpi scan and ran it through tesseract: (a) tesseract estimated the resolution as 607 dpi; (b) to a quick pass through the output, all the text in what are actual text fields are correct; and (c) flat text output is shown here.
The same toy sofware works on pictures of photographs if there's a white border so that the toy can identify corners. An approximate equivalent to a 300 dpi scan of an old Polaroid picture of my wife-to-be from before I knew her is shown here.
At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words.
To paraphrase a friend, "No one can get a PhD dissertation out of pushing phonics. You have to claim that something else is better." Or at least that something else is as/more valuable than recognizing the words early on. The new things are all well and good, but memorizing a few hundred words-as-a-chunk is still necessary. You can't sound out "bat" and "cat" forever; at some point it has to be automatic.
There are assorted postings -- the internet has made them more common -- that ask whether you can read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." Is this just an English thing? Does Romanized Japanese tolerate the same sort of misspellings for fluent readers?
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units.
German also has the useful convention of capitalizing nouns. Using Internalcombustionengine would at least signal it's a noun, even though it starts off with an adjective. Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
The example everyone remembers from college German is Handschuh (hand shoe) as a generic glove/mitten term, Fingerhandschuh for gloves, Fausthandschuh for mittens, Panzerhandschuh for armor, etc. The German is at least consistent. In English, it's another of the English/Norman dualities. Glove is from Old English; mitten is from Norman for mitten; gauntlet is from the Norman for glove. I understand there are more types of Handschuh that correspond to some of the other uses English has piled on gauntlet, like "throw down the gauntlet" or "run the gauntlet".
I'll just go ahead and invite Hartmut to explain how wrong I am :^)
* Off and on for a half-century now I have occasionally tried to adopt camel notation when I'm writing code. It never lasts, and I always go back to underscores: source_index rather than sourceIndex in something I've been writing this week.
I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language.
More than 30 years ago now, I spent some time working with an engineering team at Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company. Ericsson's internal organization at the time had hardware being done in Sweden, operating system being done in the UK, and application software being done in Spain. By decree, the official technical language inside the company was English.
The official rules for international fencing are written in French. This leads to occasional interesting difficulties. Epee rules intentionally allow some amount of incidental body-to-body contact, but not too much. There was a great deal of debate at the FIE over how to translate the French phrase for what was not allowed to English. They finally settled on "excessive jostling".
Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
As for LGM.... There is a certain atmosphere there, a way of acting, just as there is here and at every blog I have ever visited for any length of time. You pick up on what opinions are acceptable and which ones will induce a pile on and yes, also the topics where people within the community will rip into each other.
And which opinions are which have changed over time. Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to say that things are soon to come down to an actual shooting civil war. People are applauded for saying that they are leaving the country to avoid the war.
Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
Richards and Willie Nelson seem to have inherited the mantle of the Betty White jokes. "Shouldn't someone be worrying about the kind of world our kids will leave for Keith and Willie?"
From back when HP made quality stuff, not just crappy printers.
Sometime while I was in graduate school (Texas, 1976-78) I went to one of HP's sales pitches for their engineering calculators. At one point the salesman asked if there were any petroleum engineering students in the crowd and got several hands up. "You, my friends, will someday soon be walking along a catwalk and drop your calculator, watch it bounce twice, go over the edge, and fall 20 feet to the ground. What will you have if that's a Texas Instruments calculator? Pieces." Then he wound up and throw the HP calculator hard enough to bounce it off the back wall. "With an HP, you'll just yell down and ask your buddy to pick up your calculator."
My question for Schumer is my now-standard question for anyone advocating for a two-state solution: precisely where to you think the second state will be? And who is going to evict the current owners?
A personal hero, on a few levels.
A friend once remarked that the only measure of a drummer's contribution to music was their technical virtuosity. "Yeah?" I asked him. "How many more great songs might have been produced if Ginger Baker were as good at keeping a band full of huge egos together as Ringo was?"
and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I've mentioned that I have wound up as the extended families' archivist, and have thousands of pages of stuff that has been dumped on me over the years. One of my uncles spent years after he retired building a blog site where he posted content about the tiny town in Iowa where he was born and (for a while) raised.
One of the first things on my list of stuff to get safely tucked away in digital form when I decided to be serious about it was that blog content. Quite a bit of what I learned pulling everything out of Obsidian Wings was useful for pulling his stuff out of Blogger. Multiple copies are stored away now.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread”
For wj more than anything...
Got the first toy version of my nonlinear "flattening" software running. Here's the input image I've been using for testing. It's a picture (converted to grayscale) of one of my old work notebooks. The notebook is "curled" in three-space and the camera is: (a) not centered over the notebook; (b) rotated relative to the notebook; and (c) not pointed at the center of the notebook.
Here's the output from the toy software. It's an approximation of a scan at a bit under 300 dpi. In the current version I give the toy hints about where the corners are, but then it's on its own. There are errors in the area where the curvature is most extreme. OTOH, in real life such areas are likely to be empty. I'm not unhappy with the result here.
Lots of future work on illumination correction, among other things.
"
My new pillow arrived today.
What sort of pillow? Decades ago now I was waking up with neck pains and bought a buckwheat hull pillow. The common complaint from people who feel it is "But it's so hard." The first time I tried it I sort of wiggled my head into it and got as far as thinking, "Yes, it seems rather..." before I fell asleep. Still using one, with no neck pain for years. All anecdotal endorsements are suspect, of course.
"
Sympathies to all the people with health concerns.
My sister's doctors are muttering about another joint rebuild/replacement. If you looked at our respective histories, I'm the one you would expect to have torn up/worn out joints and be getting replacements. But she's the one who has had two knees, a hip, and a shoulder replaced, and an ankle rebuilt. She's talking about having a couple of arthritic knuckles frozen, while all my hand/finger joints are fine. I sometimes doubt that karma payback is a thing, because I don't deserve the joints I've been blessed with.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
"
Granddaughter #1 has a birthday this month. Her birthday doodle is done.
http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/Charlie-birthday-12.pdf
She's getting the money indirectly. She inherited my narrow palate, which causes all sorts of teeth alignment problems when all the adult molars come in. I'm covering the orthodontics bill to spread her palate now, which has to be done before the upper jaw bones finish fusing.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
So...a professional MIDIator?
I asked for that, didn't I? But yes, although when he was working on it was a few years before MIDI happened. Poking at Google, I see that people are still working to get woodwind attack transients right, now looking at the problem that what the player does with shaping their mouth and throat matters.
My only important personal experience with attack transients was when I was in junior high. The band director convinced me to switch from clarinet to oboe. Too late I learned that the reason he wanted an oboist was so he could include a "Themes From the Nutcracker Suite" piece in the Christmas concert, which had a little four- or eight-bar oboe-all-alone intro to one bit. There are so many things that can go wrong when you attack that first note on an oboe.
"
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
When I worked at Bell Labs, the Labs was in the midst of a large hiring surge bringing in lots of people in their mid-20s with shiny new degrees. There was a Bell Labs Club blanket organization whose job was, to be blunt about it, to provide activities that kept those mid-20s people out of trouble. Lots of sub-clubs. Eg, go to a movie sponsored by the Cinema Club in the very nice company auditorium Friday evening rather than going to a local bar and getting into trouble with the equivalent of "townies".
The jazz band was actually multiple bands because of demand. The folk music club was enormous. (Also strange in the sense of a group of people who wrote a set of lyrics, and performed them publicly, with excellent harmonies, set to the tune of Alice's Restaurant and running almost as long, on being hired as a systems engineer at Bell Labs, playing on all of the internal prejudices.)
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
"
My biggest complaint about metal was/is that the tempo smacked of the same fault most of the huge prog rock acts had when they were live: look how fast I can play. That said, I occasionally check in at YouTube to see if the AI people have done any new heavy metal versions of the big movies or TV smashes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XIkiSsHUM
"
...legal requirement that major international events like this have security handled by the Secret Service, with help from the FBI and Homeland Security.
I expect there will be a lot of countries that boycott the LA Games, rather than send their athletes into reach of ICE's by-then very large corps. If they risk it, I can easily imagine almost open insurrection between ICE on one side and California/LA on the other. Or between the California/LA law enforcement and the rest of the state/local government if the local police decide to side with ICE.
On “The law of the letter”
When you feel like the software is mostly together, is it something you would be willing to share? Sell? (I hesitate to suggest beta test. ;-)
Sure, but don't hold your breath. I have a long list of things that "mostly together" will require.
"
As we've gotten around to archives...
TL;DR version: I've started playing with a toy version of the beginnings of software that will eventually be a tool for my archival project. In a couple of years it ought to be interesting :^)
I'm starting to play with toy versions of software I'll be using eventually in my role as extended family archivist building a digitized record from the hundreds/thousands of pictures and document pages that have accumulated. Everything I'm doing right now is grayscale, just so that's not a surprise to anyone who goes so far as to look at the images. Most of the images are large; you'll have to do whatever tricks your browser requires to see them at full resolution.
Text documents first. A JPEG image of a document page I snapped with my iPad is here. The original image is somewhat sharper than the one shown, since JPEG is not as good with details as Apple's HEIC format. For the time being, I use ImageMagick to convert HEICs to uncompressed grayscale.
Right now the toy assumes the document is a rectangle laying flat, and I'm taking a picture of it that's out of alignment. That makes it a linear transform problem. First step is to find the corners of the document. I'm doing something not entirely simple minded. The accuracy of the toy corner-finding code is illustrated here.
It's been a long time since I did anything with linear transforms and the matrix calculations that go with that. After some online reading to refresh my memory, and finding simple versions of code for 3x3 matrices, the toy code can do a perspective transform and produce an approximate equivalent of a 300 dot-per-inch scan (or more, or less). The page in the picture is actually a pile of several sheets, stapled, so doesn't quit meet the flat rectangle assumption. The result is shown here.
In some cases, I will want to do OCR on the images. I'm using the tesseract open-source OCR program for now. Tesseract is not a toy. When I converted the photo to an estimated 600 dpi scan and ran it through tesseract: (a) tesseract estimated the resolution as 607 dpi; (b) to a quick pass through the output, all the text in what are actual text fields are correct; and (c) flat text output is shown here.
The same toy sofware works on pictures of photographs if there's a white border so that the toy can identify corners. An approximate equivalent to a 300 dpi scan of an old Polaroid picture of my wife-to-be from before I knew her is shown here.
"
At the rate software is improving, I suppose computers will be able to read to us, and write down what we say as well.
During the early 1990s I had lunch regularly with a librarian. We discussed archiving on a regular basis. Ken Burns's Civil War documentary was still pretty new. She used to say, "You want to write the source material for someone to use in 120 years to make a documentary like Burns's? Acid-free paper and pigment-based ink, my friend. And descendants willing to keep your writings in a trunk somewhere dark."
"
...why and whether kids still have to learn to write by hand in our modern age.
There seems to be a consistent body of work showing that taking notes during a lecture reinforces memory, and taking notes longhand reinforces more than typing on a keyboard. That's the pseudo-academic in me speaking, of course.
For the last twelve years or so I've been using a little note-taking application that I wrote myself. There were just too many cases where pasting in an image, or having a live URL, or even just searching for a keyword seemed to justify it. Recently I've been considering going back to paper and pen.
I thought about using an Ipad with an Apple Pencil, which has gotten very much like paper and pen (so long as you don't use the eraser much*). Unfortunately, Apple has seen fit to put handwriting recognition into the OS, and insists on putting a little line under anything you write/draw that it thinks might be a date or time. I've seen many complaints about it, and people asking why Apple can't make it optional.
* One of the reasons I always took notes in ink while I was doing research work was because sometimes I wrote down something that I thought was right, and two days later discovered I was mistaken. With ink, you have to grab a different color pen and put in a dated bit with the correction.
"
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words.
To paraphrase a friend, "No one can get a PhD dissertation out of pushing phonics. You have to claim that something else is better." Or at least that something else is as/more valuable than recognizing the words early on. The new things are all well and good, but memorizing a few hundred words-as-a-chunk is still necessary. You can't sound out "bat" and "cat" forever; at some point it has to be automatic.
There are assorted postings -- the internet has made them more common -- that ask whether you can read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae." Is this just an English thing? Does Romanized Japanese tolerate the same sort of misspellings for fluent readers?
New Math was the same sort of thing. It pushed a much broader view of what math was than just the algorithms. Look, long division is done the way it is because hundreds of years of experience informs us that it's the best way to get the right answers when you have to do a hundred division problems a day, day after day. New Math failed when the teachers pushed the broader view but didn't teach the mechanics.
"
It's just convention that one does not write railwaystation or particleaccelerator or internalcombustionengine but imo those are perceived as units.
German also has the useful convention of capitalizing nouns. Using Internalcombustionengine would at least signal it's a noun, even though it starts off with an adjective. Camel notation* from computer programming would possibly be better: InternalCompustionEngine.
The example everyone remembers from college German is Handschuh (hand shoe) as a generic glove/mitten term, Fingerhandschuh for gloves, Fausthandschuh for mittens, Panzerhandschuh for armor, etc. The German is at least consistent. In English, it's another of the English/Norman dualities. Glove is from Old English; mitten is from Norman for mitten; gauntlet is from the Norman for glove. I understand there are more types of Handschuh that correspond to some of the other uses English has piled on gauntlet, like "throw down the gauntlet" or "run the gauntlet".
I'll just go ahead and invite Hartmut to explain how wrong I am :^)
* Off and on for a half-century now I have occasionally tried to adopt camel notation when I'm writing code. It never lasts, and I always go back to underscores: source_index rather than sourceIndex in something I've been writing this week.
"
I have the suspicion that English will eventually end up as the world language.
More than 30 years ago now, I spent some time working with an engineering team at Ericsson, the Swedish telecom company. Ericsson's internal organization at the time had hardware being done in Sweden, operating system being done in the UK, and application software being done in Spain. By decree, the official technical language inside the company was English.
The official rules for international fencing are written in French. This leads to occasional interesting difficulties. Epee rules intentionally allow some amount of incidental body-to-body contact, but not too much. There was a great deal of debate at the FIE over how to translate the French phrase for what was not allowed to English. They finally settled on "excessive jostling".
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Most western metro areas are constrained by "they're not making any more attractive land" for a long time. Boulder, CO began fencing itself in with permanent open space purchases back in the 1940s, I believe. Lots of empty land east of Denver, but (a) the climate degrades quickly as you go that way and (b) there are no meaningful water rights that come with the land. Many of the neighborhoods burned in the LA fires had been built right up to the foothills by the 1950s and 1960s.
There are a lot of pictures around of those neighborhoods with isolated houses still standing. Invariably, those houses are on lots where someone scraped off the old house and build new to contemporary codes. We know (and require) so much more in the way of fire resistance and energy efficiency than we used to.
We see similar pictures every time a hurricane goes through a piece of the Gulf Coast that hasn't been hit directly for 25-30 years. Everything flattened except where the old house was scraped off and replaced.
"
And that's just the regional aspect.
My friend the anthropologist says that the suburbs of any two metro areas from Denver west are more alike than they are like anywhere else in the country. One way could be demonstrated once the Census Bureau made it possible to measure density based on "built area" rather than county area. Suburbs in the major metro areas in the West are just about twice as dense, on average, as suburbs in the rest of the country.
I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but when we were moving from New Jersey to the west Denver suburbs, my first observation was, "they really cram the houses close together here".
"
As for LGM.... There is a certain atmosphere there, a way of acting, just as there is here and at every blog I have ever visited for any length of time. You pick up on what opinions are acceptable and which ones will induce a pile on and yes, also the topics where people within the community will rip into each other.
And which opinions are which have changed over time. Several years ago, the first time I said that I expected a peaceful partition of the US, the idea was ridiculed and people piled on. Today, it is perfectly acceptable to say that things are soon to come down to an actual shooting civil war. People are applauded for saying that they are leaving the country to avoid the war.
Granted, I said the cause would be dealing with climate change -- which I still say -- and the people today are talking fighting between the fascist and non-fascist sides. Or between the urban and rural sides. Or between the fundamental Christians and everyone who isn't. Criticism tends to be limited to the fact that those divisions don't correspond well with existing state boundaries.
"
Richards and Willie Nelson seem to have inherited the mantle of the Betty White jokes. "Shouldn't someone be worrying about the kind of world our kids will leave for Keith and Willie?"
"
From back when HP made quality stuff, not just crappy printers.
Sometime while I was in graduate school (Texas, 1976-78) I went to one of HP's sales pitches for their engineering calculators. At one point the salesman asked if there were any petroleum engineering students in the crowd and got several hands up. "You, my friends, will someday soon be walking along a catwalk and drop your calculator, watch it bounce twice, go over the edge, and fall 20 feet to the ground. What will you have if that's a Texas Instruments calculator? Pieces." Then he wound up and throw the HP calculator hard enough to bounce it off the back wall. "With an HP, you'll just yell down and ask your buddy to pick up your calculator."
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I just saw a video clip from Ringo's 85th birthday party. He's four years older than Keith Richards, but looks 20 years younger :^)
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My question for Schumer is my now-standard question for anyone advocating for a two-state solution: precisely where to you think the second state will be? And who is going to evict the current owners?
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A personal hero, on a few levels.
A friend once remarked that the only measure of a drummer's contribution to music was their technical virtuosity. "Yeah?" I asked him. "How many more great songs might have been produced if Ginger Baker were as good at keeping a band full of huge egos together as Ringo was?"
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and I pulled all of the site's content out the hard way...
I've mentioned that I have wound up as the extended families' archivist, and have thousands of pages of stuff that has been dumped on me over the years. One of my uncles spent years after he retired building a blog site where he posted content about the tiny town in Iowa where he was born and (for a while) raised.
One of the first things on my list of stuff to get safely tucked away in digital form when I decided to be serious about it was that blog content. Quite a bit of what I learned pulling everything out of Obsidian Wings was useful for pulling his stuff out of Blogger. Multiple copies are stored away now.
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