verdantsymmetry - Tumblr blog

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Did they ever display any part of that AWACS they got?

After the Soviets shot down the U-2 in 1960 they put it on display at the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow. I think we deserve an impromptu spy balloon exhibit at the Smithsonian.

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Glad I only started playing after I stopped needing my clearance.

amazing

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Cool!  Grasping with soft fingers is basically what I do professionally, do you think it’ll be on Open Courseware?  

"Special Topics: Touching and grasping with soft fingers and hands" is a real class you can take at MIT this semester. If you even care.

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RAISE - To lift something up.

“The neighbors all pitched in to raise Joe’s new barn”

RAZE - To destroy or burn to the ground.

“Joe’s barn was razed in the raid across the border the next year”

IT’S NOT ‘PEEKED’ MY INTEREST

OR ‘PEAKED’

BUT PIQUED

‘PIQUED MY INTEREST’

THIS HAS BEEN A CAPSLOCK PSA

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Why do I see progressives these days just recycling the King Cotton argument without any sense of irony?  Slavery is actually bad.  Southerners, before the Civil War, argued that “Actually Northerner you may look down on us slaveholders but really your industrial wealth depends on cheap cotton and if you abolished slavery your whole house of cards would collapse.  So there!”   But then we had a civil war and abolished slavery and industry in the North did rather than opposite of collapsing.  But recently it’s become fashionable in some quarters to dig up these old arguments to argue not that slavery is good but that industry is bad because it depends on slavery I guess?

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I’m still super bothered that it’s 2^16 * 10^6 (roughly), mixing bases.  Are they keeping track of something in millions of dollars internally?  Did think they were using decimal floating point but, AFAIK, misunderstand how it works?  I can get over someone misreading a hand drawn figure but that that number exists at all bothers me at a much deeper level.

Alameda’s limit was $65 billion. (Slide 18 shows a code snippet, showing that the actual limit was $65,355,999,994.)

(If you look at the code snippet, the limit is Decimal('65355999994.00000000'))

Why that number? 65,355 immediately catches my eye, of course, as 2^16 - 1 and therefore the maximum value of an unsigned 16-bit integer. But it's not 65,355, it's 65,355,999,994, which is not, by my calculation, near any powers of 2. Maybe, for some reason, you care about the number of millions, but then why not make the remainder 999,999?

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It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart Of feeling the full weight of our burdens It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind And knowing we are not alone in fear Not alone in the dark

- The Atheist Christmas Carol by Vienna Teng

my opening line "It's Christmas time, there's no need to be afraid" raises a lot of questions already addressed by my opening line

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Lets all just make sure we never try giving weapons to squids.

It took me a while to suss out the difference between land mines and coal mines.

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the fact that we made it through the Cold War is nothing short of a miracle. I wish we talked about Mutual Assured Destruction more in schools

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The history of iron working is also great.

Have any of you ever wanted an in depth discussion on the strategy and logistical elements of various military campaigns of Lord of the Rings?  Ever thought that Saruman might have been a “dummy-wummy whose plans failed because they were bad” but needed someone to point out exactly what classic errors he fell into?  Want to get a better understanding of what “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics” really means?  Well, I’ve found A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry pretty great and you might like it too.  Especially the Lord of the Rings sequence.  

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Have any of you ever wanted an in depth discussion on the strategy and logistical elements of various military campaigns of Lord of the Rings?  Ever thought that Saruman might have been a “dummy-wummy whose plans failed because they were bad” but needed someone to point out exactly what classic errors he fell into?  Want to get a better understanding of what “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics” really means?  Well, I’ve found A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry pretty great and you might like it too.  Especially the Lord of the Rings sequence.  

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Sodalite is a type of rock that reacts with UV light. When exposed to it, the rock turns to a golden, lava-like color.                           

Source

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They managed to fix the student center, basically, so all things are possible.  Maybe the fix for Stata would involve the shaman hat the student center used to have?

I had this really weird dream last night that spanned a couple weeks where we all had to live in the stata center and people kept drowning in their sleep cuz their rooms would fill up with water but by the morning it was always empty and dry

It was one of those the building is alive scenarios

Anyway tldr we found out all the building really wanted was to be more normally shaped so we put up scaffolding and fixed it all

Rooms randomly filling up with water and killing everyone inside seems extremely on brand for Stata, tbqh.

@another-normal-anomaly @quantumofawesome @gender-trash @augmentedvarangian

I think that’s all the MIT tumblrs I know?

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Walked down to Jamaica Pond this morning.  9 and 1/3 miles total.

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20+40 then 7 + 8 then 60 + 15

I love "how do you do math?" questions. Here's how my brain does it:

How about you guys?

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I enjoyed The Outer Wilds and Disco Elysium recently.  Be warned the later can get a bit dark.

Looking for suggestions for a new game to play, nothing in my library seems interesting

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To make this point I’d really like to see parallel graphs of crimes that made the newspapers by year vesus crimes that made the news paper that people can remember in 2020 by year and see the two lines get further and further apart the further back you go.

this graph sucks so hard. orange is crime rate; blue is the proportion of Americans who believe the derivative of the orange graph is positive (within their community). the yellow “perception gap” is completely meaningless. 

which is not to say the data in the graph does not support the point they’re trying to make; it does (if accurate). but it’s a visualization that visualizes sheer nonsense!