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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Awesome bandwidth to be sure, but I do think there is a difference between data transfer to RAM (such as network traffic) vs. traffic purely from one location to another (station wagon with tapes/747 with SD cards/etc.).

    For the latter, actually using the data in any meaningful way is probably limited to read time of the media, which is likely slow.

    But yeah, my go-to would be micro SD cards on a plane :)


  • My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

    It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…


  • qjkxbmwvz@startrek.websitetoScience Memes@mander.xyzbitey
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    23 days ago

    Fun fact, the (rough) conversion efficiency of calories to mechanical joules in the human body (separate from the mechanical to electrical you’re referring to) is about 25% — but this is about the same factor as going from calories to joules! So, for a human to put out 13.5 kJ of energy would require about 13.5 food calories (kilocalories).







  • It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

    To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

    License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

    Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

    If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

    That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.


  • When I took some astronomy classes in the early 2000s, Jocelyn Bell was absolutely credited. In her own words:

    It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!

    That said, yeah, I think she absolutely should have been awarded the Nobel prize. But while she did not, she has the admiration — rightly so — of many a budding astronomer.





  • I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

    Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

    This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).