Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don’t have to be media related (they still can be though).
Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.
Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.
you might enjoy reading about Champollion and how he deciphered the hieroglyphic system.
The enormous differences between korean and japanese writing are interesting for someone who can read neither. Is it related to your factoid about the language’s relations?
Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided “nope, this sucks, I’m making a new thing”, and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.
Lithuanian is the closest living language to Proto-Indo-European, and has a lot of cognates with Sanskrit.
Baltic languages are awesome. I only wish I could master those case systems!
There are two ways to learn them, you can try memorising a bunch of tables or learn with a lot of direct practice. Probably a bit of both. I am a native speaker of Lithuanian but I don’t even remember the cases, to be honest.
Interesting, I assumed most East Asian languages were originally formed from Chinese.
Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it’s more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it’s not an ancestor.
Connections.
I love the stories about how seemingly disconnected events at different times and in different parts of the world actually have a connection. Like how some random chance meeting of two people 100’s of years ago started a chain reaction that ended up with us having some cool new technology or idea.
Jeri Ryan, who played 7 of 9 in Star Trek, was married to Jack Ryan, who was a Republican senator. Allegedly, Jack liked watching her have sex with strangers. They got into a sex scandal that led to Jack Ryan losing the re-election. The man who won that election was, then a political upstart, Barack Obama.
So … there’s this BBC television series presented by Jim Burke that you might enjoy.
For those interested, it’s by James Burke, from 1978, and it’s called Connections. Episodes are on YouTube.
I wish I could upvote this more than once, I loved that show!
Yep. Loved that show. It’s what got me thinking about all of this stuff
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And your favorite moviea are butterfly effect and Cloud Atlas?
FPGAs, love the damn things. They’re circuits that you can re-program at will after they’ve been manufactured! If you build, like, a 2-input AND gate, that’s all it will ever be. It can only take in 2 inputs and AND them together. But with an FPGA, they’re manufactured to be versatile; you “program” the circuit you want to achieve onto the chip, and it will achieve that functionality! You can make a 2-input AND gate, slap it onto a bread board, and have yourself that nifty little AND gate, but if you later decide you wanted it to be a NAND gate, just reprogram the chip and like magic, what was once an AND gate is now a NAND gate. They’re great!
I wanted to get into FPGAs when I was making some custom boards with MCUs but I really had a hard time finding a good idea for a starter project with them. How did you get started? Any recommendations?
The “print hello world” equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA’s clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.
Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:
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Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That’s the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It’s harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)
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Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a “vending machine” state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would “vend” (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn’t be like, “well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110…, so I’m gonna start over”, because I could input “111111010” and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!
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Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It’s a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you’re copying, you’ll pick up on it fast.
Really, the world’s your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.
And if you’d like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page
Let me know if I can ever be of any assistance :)
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That’s why I love my Analog pocket
I’m so glad Analog Pocket is popularizing FPGAs, a lot of people are discovering them because of it.
CYCLE ACCURATE HARDWARE RECREATION. IT’S INCREDIBLE.
For anyone reading this that is wondering what FPGA stands for, it’s Field Programmable Gate Array. Just figured I’d save some people the trouble of looking it up.
I’ve been working with fpgas for about 15 years. In that time, the projects have gone from pld style logic as you’ve described, to process algorithms, and now we’re implementing machine learning trained neural nets in hardware and running Linux on board.
It’s really wild. They are pretty neat.
Man, no kidding. We’ve got SoCs, we’ve got processors running on the FPGA fabric, we’ve got communications to Ethernet, PCIe, any AXI you like really. They can talk to RAM, storage, other processors, output graphics, kiss me on the forehead, and tuck me in at night. (I think.)
A coworker was telling me about the big shots in New York trading companies that are starting to implement FPGA architectures into their high-frequency trading algorithms, as the blazing high speed and great parallelization helps them squeeze out a couple extra microseconds in their algorithms. I think that’s a good sign of people wising up to this potential here.
I don’t know of any ML training on FPGAs, but I have no doubt that it can be / it is being done.
Edit: I just remembered the other day, I was shown a module that could take in a grey scale image, do edge dection, and output the edges as a new image file. Which isn’t that hard, it’s convolution on a sliding window, but what baffled me is that it was done in fewer cycles than could be compiled through C code, and the pipeline wasn’t even that deep. It’s crazy!
Ya, it’s fun stuff. We’re using ML for particle identification and tracking in high-energy physics. It’s magnitudes faster than anything a CPU/GPU can do…
do edge detection, and output the edges as a new image file.
your eyes do this, the cells in your eyes do a variety of edge detection and orientation detection before passing on this preprocessed image to the brain where the brain processes it further
I literally cannot answer this without seeming like a pretentious, arrogant ass. Anyway, quantum field theory, high energy physics, condensed matter physics, generative art, computing algorithms, arcane math theories (meaning difficult to understand, not magical), procedural art, simulations, awesome places to visit in the world, Factorio, the channels I watch on YouTube. Honestly, I don’t have anyone around me who cares about or understands most of my hobbies. They all love me and care for me, just not the stuff I like.
What they don’t understand is that the factory must grow
And grow it shall. Nice to meet you fellow engineer. Nauvis deserves to be paved for being in the way of our ships.
have you watched the youtube series ‘the biggest ideas in the universe’? it’s got about all that (no art). That PBS space time channel is additionally quite fire
I never miss a Space Time. So glad I found that years ago. Thank you for the suggestion.
Cassette tapes. They may not have the most accurate sound, but they have a cool, unique sound, and they feel really nice to hold. People who love vinyl often hate tapes. I love both.
I recently started collecting cassettes since a number of metal bands release on the format. Everyone always has an odd reaction when I start talking about why I think they’re cool.
I collect both. I still have an old early-90s Sony system that I plunked a modern record player on top of and use almost every day. I also have a (factory) tape player in my old project car and will record CDs to a tape with the same system. Listening to modern music on tapes in an old car is just fun.
Cassettes also remember where you stopped listening so it’s trivial to continue later from the exact spot.
I should probably add something of my own. I like failed firearms designs that had some features that makes them objectively better if you overlook all the downsides. Or generally anything where one person made it because they thought it was cool and no one with better judgement stopped them.
Like the Gyrojet pistols, unlike traditional pistols they used rocket projectiles. This meant two major things one the guns didn’t need to have any pressure bearing parts and could be made incredibly light compared to normal pistols (.88lb/.4kg vs 2.2lbs/1kg), and the down side they reached maximum speed much slower than normal cartridges.
This meant that in practical terms a target close enough might not give the rocket sufficient time to accelerate to effective speed and wind would have a greater effect on the projectile. Hence they don’t make them anymore.
The PN 90 is used a lot by the movie industry because it ejects casings downwards so they do not hit the other actor’s or the filming crew’s faces. It was originally made as a relatively small firearm that can penetrate body armour to be used by the truck drivers and guards in case the Soviets invaded and dropped well armoured paratroopers behind the front lines.
I’m a big lover of the engineering and design of firearms, but think we’re ridiculously over-armed in the US. Puts me in an odd position; I’m prior service - I look at weapons as weapons. Some people see them as fetishes and it gives me the creeps.
If you’re interested in both engineering and design you should check out Forgotten Weapons if you haven’t yet. He does disassemblies and summarizes the history of firearms.
oh yeah, love Ian and the work he’s done for over a decade.
I’ve probably been watching him for at least 7 years now. Met him once too, really cool dude if you ever get the chance.
I would LOVE to meet him, if just to ask: does it ever bother you, the disconnect between responsible gun ownership, historical preservation, and outright firearms idolization?
He accepts questions for his q&a on patreon about every month. My take is that for many they’re rarely used items that are prolifically displayed (often inaccurately) in media, leading to harmful myths like not needing to aim shotguns. Plus in English we tend to exaggerate things so when people hear stories they can walk away with misconceptions about the true extent of their abilities.
my take is that for many they’re rarely used items that are prolifically displayed (often inaccurately) in media,
In 2021, there were a total of 48,830 firearm deaths.
That’s not a media myth, it’s a fact. Our country has become an free fire warzone and I didn’t sign up for this shit.
As of september there were over 50 school shootings just this year.
Myths? Misconceptions? Please, don’t. Just don’t. That’s an incredibly poor way to respond mate. Dead kids, dead innocents, deserve better than ‘it’s just a myth’.
This is my problem with firearms. They’re so nifty that people lose their fucking minds when it comes to being responsible owners. Which then makes it ridiculously easy for people who can’t access them legally access them anyway. And I’m fucking tired of adults acting like children when it comes to weapons.
Morrowind.
True conspiracies. Cryonics.It seems like Morrowind has a tiny cult following in the TES fanbase still. The AI Dagoth Ur memes took off a few months ago.
I am surprised by morrowind memes more often than I would expect(never), but I mean in real life. Even gamers that I meet in GameStop have rarely ever played Morrowind. But it’s cool, I can take it way too seriously online anyway.
I think Morrowind is one of those, “you had to be there,” things. It’s hard to get someone who was a kid when Skyrim came out to understand what made Morrowind special, or what sets Morrowind apart from later Bethesda games other than clunky controls.
Whatever you grow up with has such a strong hold for sure, although I think that with Morrowind, throw on the hi res body/texture, controls and sky mods, with just a few clicks the game feels and looks like a modern game, and the game itself already has a way stronger lore and immersive in-game universe than any open-world game I’ve played since.
Oh, Morrowind is easily my favorite, and the absurdly detailed lore and interlinked world is a huge part of that. When you suddenly realize that almost everything is interconnected and even the most out-of-the-way characters are usually connected to a major faction or overarching plot in some way is fantastic. But where Morrowind really starts to shine is on the third or fourth run when you really start to realize that scope and it’s hard to convince someone now to put that kind of commitment into a game, especially one that’s kind of clunky by modern standards. There are just so many games now that people will play something that big once or twice and move on, but that’s barely scratching the surface of the world Morrowind offers; even if you do everything you can in one run, mutually exclusive factions and mutually exclusive routes within factions mean that you’ll need to play again and again and again to really see how deep it all goes.
I feel the same way, just the depth of literally every single route they’ve created, and I’ve collected the entire library of in-game books more than once and just read through all of the books I can find after I finally get to the end of a run because I know I’ll want some sort of epilogue, but there isn’t really an epilogue if you’ve done all of the side quests that you can on a particular run, so I’ll read through the in-game books they have, or I’ll even go through the game manual and just read about the different star signs and what they mean and trying to figure out how they enter into the game and if there’s obvious tells like which npc has which star sign. The game just has a fascinating depth that has not been matched by another game that I’ve played so far. And other games are fantastic and deep and broad like Mass effect and even the other elder scrolls games, but I think the more run down atmosphere with siltstriders and temples made of crumbling sandstone rather than broken granite like in oblivion, the depth and the physical atmosphere and the seemingly unending retinue of characters that even after three playthroughs, you’re like wait, who is this guy? He’s the nephew of who? And then it turns out there’s an extra story there that you never heard of before, or a reference to him in a in-game political biography, or this extra cave behind a waterfall, that’s as large as seyda neen that comtains four books detailing the lost history of whatever the crap that you’ve never heard of before. And I know that they have a lot of information like the number of words are also very large in subsequent elder scrolls games, but their lore is not as comprehensive and convincing and compelling, even if the reflection on the snow is prettier or the vanilla fireballs have better sparks haloing around them.
I just hope eventually I get to see a recreated Morrowind in elder scrolls 9: tamriel when I’m 70 and all of the provinces are there or something.
I go back to morrowind every couple few years because the amazing dedication and man hours that the modders have put into it, it’s such an absolutely beautiful game, like you can add in fantasy style street lights along the walkways that lead in and out of cities, amazing night sky is with true constellations and extra moons or planets, just so much dedication and appropriately stylized changes that modders have made to this game, that have not abated in the two decades since it’s been released that even if an official morrowind never gets redone, the Morrowind you can revisit right now with the appropriate mods installed is as exciting and more beautiful than the original world that was already enthralling.
If you haven’t checked out OpenMW already, definitely do so. It’s a replacement engine that doesn’t impact the gameplay, but does add features that the original lacks, even with MGE and the Code Patch, and greatly improves performance and stability. Their distant land implementation is so well optimized that the last time I played I could set the draw distance arbitrarily far with minimal performance impact. The latest release also added support for some very well done and appropriately atmospheric shaders, such as one that adds gorgeous volumetric fog.
Skywind is also making headway and seems to be made by people who really got Morrowind. When it releases in who knows how many years, it should provide a version of the game with more dynamic gameplay, but the same world faithfully recreated.
Chess! I suck ass at it so I don’t fit in with actual chess players, and everyone I know is totally disinterested in the game. I can only fuel my love for the game by watching Gotham trash talk 1200 rated players when I know that I’m a lichess 700
Astronomy! Not astrology! No, that’s not a smudge on the lens, that’s M3, and it took me an hour to find it in this Bortle class 7 suburb with my 4.5" dob, and I’m damn proud of myself for that
Anime! No, I haven’t seen Naruto, or DBZ, and I ain’t got time for One Piece. How’s about Shinsekai Yori, Haibanei Renmei, or ACCA? Nah, nobody I know has seen those, even though we’re in our late 20s and are a bit old for shounen at this point
Computing history, obscure operating systems, movies and music my friends never heard about, fringe humour nobody gets.
You might enjoy Cathode Ray Dude on youtube. Really obscure 80s-00s stuff.
Thanks, sounds like my kind of entertainment!
Can you give an example of fringe humour that comes to your mind ?
For instance, some Portuguese comedians that are not mainstream in Portugal. Can’t get more obscure than that.
Obscure 80s and 90s hip hop records that very few people have heard of because they sold less than a couple hundred thousand records, some much less
Classic black and white films and TV shows. No one I know in real life enjoys these.
Because I was an insomniac pre-adolescent, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners are some of my most comforting memories.
The State Emergency Services of Australian states. Basically, they’re state government funded volunteer rescue agencies that focus on floods and storms. They also provide other rescue services outside of major population centres, like vertical rescue and road crash rescue. I think it’s a great idea because we get enough severe storms and floods that a specialist agency is worthwhile, but there can be years between large scale events, so having the surge capacity of a volunteer agency is great.
It’s a similar story with the CFA/CFS/RFS/NTFRS¹/TFS¹/whatever’s happening in WA¹, but instead of rescue they do firefighting. Their main (“combat”) role is fighting bushfires, which happen seasonally so surge capacity is important. However, in country areas they also provide structural and vehicle firefighting services. I’m aware that the US have a similar situation with volunteer firefighters though, so I’m not so keen to teach grandma to suck eggs.
¹These agencies are metro and rural firefighting agencies, so their combat role is all fires, not just bushfires.
Sounds similar to the German THW (Technisches Hilfswerk - engl. Federal Agency for technical relief) It’s 99% (unpaid)¹ volunteers, and they assist in case heavy/specialized equipment is required. For example they build large pipelines and water reservoirs in case of wildfires to supply the firefighters, build tent cities including drinking water filtration, sanitary and kitchen facilities, as well as recovery operations after disasters².
While they mostly act locally (supporting buildings after fires, or recovering car wrecks when the firefighters don’t have big enough equipment) they do have some international quick-response forces.
¹ The volunteers are insured via the state, and employers in non-critical jobs are required by law to release them in case of an alarm.
² They were initially founded as a civilian service to restore infrastructure and recover civilians during wartime, (Ziviler Bevölkerungsschutz - engl. civil protection) they thankfully haven’t needed to do that job and nowadays focus on natural disasters, both national and intentional.
Similar, except both types of Australian agency do the firefighting and rescue work as well as the support work and some of the recovery stuff. The main focus of volunteer training though is on rescue/firefighting.
Don’t forget the „Freiwillige Feuerwehr“ that carries the bulk of firefighting capacity in German towns.
I feel like people could benefit from what I know about Butt Stuff™.
please, go on
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Googology. The “study” of ridiculously large numbers. It’s a rabbit hole of recursion and mathematics that starts with stuff like googolplex (1010100) and never really ends.
Rhythm games, 100%. I am a fair bit obsessed with them but I have yet to find a friend who truly Gets It. They either only like music, or they like games. Somehow never the marriage of the two.
I like music, and I like games. But I loathe rhythm games. I’m so bad at them. I have pretty good rhythm in general, but those games kick my arse and frustrate the heck out of me.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that osu! was the beginning of things starting to go downhill for me…
(emergency alert system) videos. love them, don’t know anyone irl who actually like it or even know that it exists.
