Month: August 2021

I won a fight with my computer. I typed >format c:\ until it shut up, so that had all the subtlety of a brick, but it worked.

It’s extremely weird the way the ether idea comes back.

Michelson-Morley pretty definitively sank the idea, but the notion itself floats around. As a ‘cool-looking rock’ aficionado, I often talk to hippies who explain wave-functions mean they need to get high. I smile and nod. But they do mention that wavefunctions are everywhere and in all places. Um, yeah but no. The idea, that there is a substrata everywhere, permeating everything, has endured beyond Michelson-Morley.

Even religions often mention this idea with God being omnipresent. If you’re a scientist, you want a scientific thing everywhere. And you want to test it. If you’re a popular science enthusiast, you want popsci everywhere, and you want it to mean you should smoke a bowl. If you’re a religious figure, you want God everywhere, and you want to believe it. People tend to find what they’re looking for.

Right now, there’s an odd little idea floating around that Electric Fields exhibit some fluid properties. That doesn’t mean EF are physical fluids, but they do exhibit some odd behaviors. You can’t scoop them up or anything. But mathematically, if you do CFM on EF, the numbers you get are weird. What’s more, some forms of EF are seemingly everywhere. The best example is the cosmic background radiation, which is observable pretty much everywhere.

I’m being a little loose here with electric fields vs magnetic fields. Thinking on paper, as it were. But the idea that something ineffable and omnipresent exists is oddly ineffable and omnipresent itself.

On the east side of the Ritchie Engineering building is York Street, a one-way street going north. As I walked past York, an orange Jeep Compass approached on Iliff going west to east, so moving toward me. It did not have its turn signal on. When it came to York, the driver turned suddenly and went south, the wrong way, and nearly ran me over. The driver yelled ‘Watch where you’re going, dumb—!” and drove off.

That’s my day. How are you?

A lot of mobile games are grindfests. The player does the same level over and over again to acquire items, currency, or whatever. It ceases to be fun.

As such, many grindy games institute automatic play, where the player can have their phone play without them, or skipping play. The player uses a button or in-game item and effectively plays the level multiple times in an instant.

That’s a weird little balance. When the grinds got too bad, the game makers made the grinds easier. They didn’t reduce the grinding; they just made grinding easier. And people play these games.

I do to, some I’m not on my high-horse. But it’s weird. Why do I play these things if the biggest improvement in them is not playing? I don’t do that in card games or multiplayer games.

I think the difference is mobile grinding games make the grinding good, while card games, board games, etc. with a grind mechanic tend to have not playing as a punishment. The player is inflicted with a skip or missed turn, while the mobile grindfest rewards the player with a skipped or missed turn.

It’s still weird.

Looks like I dodged a bullet.

The Congressional Budget Office is a non-partisan organization of experts when they agree with you. They’re a bunch of hacks when they don’t.

What’s the difference between grey and gray? It’s grAy in America, and grEy (almost) Everywhere else.

I’ve always found that interesting.

Anyway, another of those little bits is the Mr./Mr dichotomy. In the US we write a bit more formally than most of the rest of the English speakers of the world, so we add the period. Most other places don’t. I’ve usually stuck to that convention because it seems a bit jarring not to.

But no more. Today I throw off the chains of tradition, and live life to the fullest. I’m writing Mr/Mrs/Ms and living in infamy.

The most American English thing possible is adopting other bits of grammar because they’re useful. That is what we do. It’s our thing.

Steps

Isildur gets a bum wrap. Yes, he did fail, but he was battling Sauron’s will and malice in Mount Doom. Do we mock Fingolfin for losing after wounding Morgoth seven times before the peaks of Thangorodim? The Isildur hate is like mocking someone for getting poisoned and dying.

“Ha, ha! After you were poisoned, you died! Loser.”

That’s just not fair.

It’s like making fun of sprinters because cars are faster. The Man contested with the will of Sauron! He didn’t win, but he did try. Come on.

Is ‘almost xxx’ used to refer to slightly more than xxx in other countries, such as Sweden?