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I'm gonna repurpose this ...

"They can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons What reasons do you need? Oh oh oh whoa whoa"

Boomtown Rats


And today’s Sunday! A day we can all like.

(Would it have been better if OP posted tomorrow? Since we’re asking philosophical Qs.)


Yes, this sounds like a close match. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0r6w3pNpGc


Unpopular opinion, but here goes ... The pictures are absolutely charming. This is because they distill the essential qualities of the object (from the child's POV), which is lost when you have perfect representation art. But turning them into real objects results in things that are often terrifying and grotesque, not charming. I don't believe the kids wanted their object to look like that in real life. They may be proud that their creation is realized, but I doubt their drawing is an expression of desire. They just have imperfect skills in representation. In contrast, there is imaginative art that kids excel at (e.g. a puppy with wings and a goatee). That's something that is really cool to see as a real object.


That whale/seal was very disturbing


Greybeard is but a stage. Coding wisdom is accrued, powers tested. I have transformed to the next stage -- whitebeard! Now I wield power openly and code with ease ignoring the stares and doubts of younger coders :)


They sent you back!


Saruman :)


Working with the real thing, I remember the horrible feeling when the rubber band holding the card deck together snaps! The FORTRAN cards all had line numbers, but what a pain for a several hundred line program.


I heard it mentioned by an old timer that some programmers in those days used to draw a diagonal line with marker across the side of the stack of cards. This was to make sorting the cards faster if the stack was dropped.


Yes, that helped you. But you still had to put them back in order :( Visual sorting O(n).


> divided from the hirsute future by a follicle singularity

I love the sound of that! Pretty awesome prose :)


Thank you! :) ;p xx ;p


My grandparents and parents either experienced or personally knew people who lost everything at some point, through war, social strife, or economics, and personal tragedies. Same on my spouse's side. Physical photos and letters were among the few things that often survived, possibly because they are only of value to the original 'owner'. I think that close brush with the impermanence of belongings fueled the habits of preparing for loss by archiving and preserving physical mementos. People trust that digital artifacts will survive through redundancy, but we're so early in the process of testing that belief. And society has been rather stable in comparison to my grandparents' generation ...


My parents house burned down. They had 20 minutes to grab what they could before wildfire came.

My dad dumped out a box of full of gold to put the pet rabbit in the box.

Later on the wtf hit. Why did I not just put the rabbit on top of the gold.

Pepper the rabbit lived a long and happy life though.


Wouldn't gold survive the fire? Melting point is near 2000 degrees F


They were able to salvage some gold from fire. I think they got about 1,000 dollars of raw metal out of 100,000 worth of Coins


Ingots and sovereigns, perhaps. But jewellery would've taken some damage.


Like all things: things survive as long as there are people with a will to maintain them. Will my hypothetical kids want my 10 TB archive of projects, photos, and videos enough to keep them stored and learn the tools needed to access them? Who knows. We can say archving has never been easier though.

I really doubt there's a future where archivists lose the ability to open a pdf, doc, jpg, or png, even if those are not standard formats supported by OSes in the future. The data will likely be there and accessible, but it's unknown if the interest will be there. Attention is already stretched to an atom-thick sheet. If that trend continues I can't imagine people caring about things that happened last week, let alone last century (most of the time).


My grandmother, who was a child in ww2 and experienced extreme resource scarcity after the war, would keep a lot of potted/preserved food in the cellar. After she passed, we didn't really see that as useful and dumped it all (it didn't appear particularly edible to us - maybe if you're starving.)

What I mean by that is, people probably only keep what is useful to them. And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.


> And if your collection is seen as useful to some people in a couple decades isn't really easy to tell. Depends on the circumstances I'd say.

Though I think you can get a good idea by asking yourself questions like "what things of my grandfather's am I interested in?" and "what kinds of things of their grandfathers are people often interested in?"

Also, someone's always interested in genealogy. So I bet a short bio with a good photo, spread around in a few physical copies, will probably be preserved for quite some time.


You're right, and you're an optimist! But people lose things not just from a loss of will to maintain them, but rather also from events outside their control. The means to read digital media survive, but could events lead to the loss/corruption of the digital media itself. And the effort to maintain digital archives is sometimes large, especially when tech changes rapidly. Convenience trumps almost everything else! And I'm not talking about my kids. At some point, I'll be too old to deal with the digital archives on my own, but a box of pictures will be within reach.


Brilliant!


I know you're not supposed to complain about downvotes, but seriously?! A complement about a witty comment gets me downvoted. I give up.


Did you mean, "...gets me downvoted. I give UP." ;)


That's what the upvote button is for.


There is more than one way to give positive feedback. Think of it like metric buckets. Imagine you could only rate movies out of one.

Sometimes you really like something and you want to tell the person you really liked it.

This obsession people develop about the "right" way to use upvotes and comments is inane.


Somewhat the opposite, but are there tips/tricks to get a song stuck in head -- sort of in a controllable manner? I enjoy having songs stuck in my head, but usually it's not the song I want!


It's my personal experience that songs that I haven't played to the end get are more likely to get stuck. What's more, it's usually the span around the point at which I stopped the playback that keeps echoing on andon andonandon. Same thing with any other media. I remember books I've left midway with incredible detail. Books I've finished, I find hard to remember titles let alone the name of the main character. I believe it's called the Ovsiankina Effect[0]. And as someone who's had a relatively bad memory, it freaks me out.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovsiankina_effect


Thanks. Come to think of it, that rings true in my experience.


Isn't there something besides water that could be used that would be more effective at putting out battery fires? I doubt this is Tesla-specific and the number of EVBs is growing.


Boron and Sand. Oops.. Wrong movie.

But something solid would have to be dumped on it that was already strongly oxidized. I'm thinking something like crushed bauxite would have enough strongly bonded oxygen. Its just a matter of getting close enough to it to pile it on. Probably dump a pile of aluminum ore a dozen yards from the fire and use a fire shielded bulldozer to shove it into the fire. Its going to take a rather large and messy pile to do it though. And being just a brain storm, for all we know it might make things worse.


Specialized tools go toward dunking the whole car in a container full of water or delivering the water to the underside of the car. Seems to me that water remains the preferred solution for some good reason. Maybe environmental?


Takes up to 3,000 gallons of water for a 600lbs Lithium ion battery that has caught on fire.

Most promising put out of EV fires is “dunking” the EV: erecting a portable tank wall around the EV on fire and pouring water into it.

Dunking helps to contain environmental spread of 7,000 cells of chemicals. Unfortunately, dunking doesn’t work everywhere (ie, ravine, ditch, pileups, uneven ground).

https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/article/212550...


For the uneven ground case, if it's not too far gone, say just smoking yet, then moving it first seems a viable option.


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