Month: November 2023

Very nice 🙂 be careful, once you start reading, you can’t stop!

Challenge: write the word “bachelor’s degree” in English without looking it up in a dictionary. Maybe try “awareness” as well.

Barely had time to minimize the windows and close the browser

(The thread is closed, Slava was first and got the pass)

Does anyone want to split a masterclass.com membership with me? The offer expires on November 24. Normally it’s $10 a month, but this way it would be $5 each. However, they do ask for a payment for the full year upfront.

“Unpacked” my 3D printer. Designed and hastily printed a lid for the multicooker. Originally, the steam would shoot up like a fountain, causing half the kitchen to be covered in grease. Simply covering the valve with, say, a towel, would result in both the towel (not a big deal) and the entire multicooker (not great) getting greasy. Initially, the idea was to divert the steam into a special channel, but the pressure there bounces everything off regardless. Now I’m experimenting with diverting the steam into a glass via a tube. Overall, it’s working, but it would be wise to reprint it on an SLA printer since the temperatures are high and the PLA plastic surely won’t last long.

At masterclass.com, there is a course by an author I’ve always known as “Noam Chomsky,” and Wikipedia agrees. But it turns out, it’s pronounced Chomsky. Just as you imagine. Live and learn.

By the way, this gentleman is already 94 years old.

P.S. By the way, does anyone have a subscription to a masterclass?

I wonder why no service like Zoom, Teams, Slack, etc. has a feature for mutual screen sharing – when A shows their screen to B, and B shows their screen to A. Ideally, if it were possible to take control over each other’s computers, moving each other’s mouse and typing on each other’s keyboard. If anyone knows such services, please share. All existing ones are somehow unidirectional. One shares, the other watches.

Examples from the comments:

Take programmers, for instance. They need to find the cause of some bug. Together. Constantly, either I or a colleague would find some clues. In logs, in the code. And with an open mic, you can instantly say “look what I found.” He would say something like “nonsense, we’ve seen this a long time ago, definitely not related. But I’m looking over here…”

Or designers brainstorming in their own Illustrator.

Or one teaching another how to draw in Illustrator or Krita.

Or two people analyzing a large PDF and clarifying various things with each other, finding it useful to see what the other is looking at.

At the opera Romeo and Juliet

I have the feeling that this time again, everything will end badly

This green trough is a very cool thing for its time. Saw it today in a museum. Look, more than 65 years ago they made a flying platform controlled by leaning of the body. Like a Segway in the air. Apparently inspired by the “flying carpet”.

Essentially, yes, it’s just an upside-down helicopter. But nevertheless, two or three prototypes out of six have survived, and here one of them is on display at our Udvar-Hazy.

Before buying absolutely anything unusual from Asian stores, it’s better to do some research. It turns out that you should avoid eating swai fish, also known as panga, pangasius, sutchi, cream dory, striped catfish, Vietnamese catfish, tra, basa, iridescent shark, and Siamese shark, though it’s not a shark at all. Because there’s a high likelihood (70-80%) that it contains vibrios (bacteria) and various other nasty things, including poisonous substances. Probably in minimal amounts, but they accumulate.