“I can take him!” -last words of Ezekiel Bonesundered before fighting the Mushroom King.
Summer 2023
How can I get to Alaska without being a passenger?
Websites
I wish the Autopian would hire some people that aren’t angry all the time. Like Stef Schrader. DT and MS are both pretty good, but I generally don’t read MH, PG, or JT anymore.
Robot Arms
There is a serious lack of mid-tier robot arms in the $200 to $750 range.
Physics
You really can’t shoot a hamster out of anything. The aerodynamics are all wrong.
Beyond the Idle
Been playing The Tower. It’s an active incremental game.
Indiana Jones
Raiders of the Lost Ark was a truly fantastic movie.
Goodnight Moon
Too much negativity, even in my own head, and the positive stuff is bland, I’m-not-dying statements of objective truth but I don’t feel.
I broke my last water bottle and got a new one. I’m happy about that. New shoes came in. Fit well out of the box (almost a first). Gave a student who needed it a pep talk. He seemed appreciative. Saving a ton of money by not buying junk food, but man do I want some junk. The family is well, and the nephew loves Minecraft.
The Gurgeh Perpetual Motion Machine
In honor of the Culture series, I present the Gurgeh, a true perpetual motion machine.
Originally the Gurgeh was a 1% efficient power supply. It was useful in a peculiar way but not too efficient (that 1%). So after a year of work, I improved the efficiency to 2%.
Which was better, but still not hot.
After another year of labor, I improved the efficiency to 3%, an improvement of another 1%. That’s 1% a year for two years running. Good, but it still needed improvement.
Another year of toil and research passed, and I got it to 4%! That’s 1% a year again.
Perpetual motion! At 1% a year, in 96 years it will be 100% efficient! In 97 years, it will be 101% efficient! Free energy forever! Post scarcity world!
The Gurgeh, our ticket to a real, plausible, totally not space-wizard fantasy, hard scifi, post scarcity world. You can always extrapolate from any dataset forever.
-_-
Quotations
You wanna know what’s so useful you don’t even realize it? Opening quotes.
“The door is behind the bookshelf,” said Bob. But it’s perilous.”
Look at that for a second. Is that intuitive at all?
Nope! But omitting the second quotes was quite useful when typesetting was difficult, paper was scarce, and pagecount was king. It’s still hanging around.
“Opening quotations are mandatory,” I said. “Even after dialogue tags.”