• 0 Posts
  • 173 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • They say that an ordnance tech at a dead run outranks everyone else, but I’d say a cat making a bee-line for shelter probably outranks them if you want to remain in the same number of pieces. Cats have good hearing and the nous to associate a stimulus with bad things happening and to get away in time.


  • Even in cases like this justice must not just be done, but be seen to be done. It seems her guilt has been established, which is good; her sentencing comes next. It seem unlikely that there are any mitigating circumstances to reduce the punishment, but that judgement must be seen to be fair. The French citizenry are not renouned for their forebearance in the face of injustice, so I would be tempted to trust their system for now.

    ETA: In fact, it seems like the punishment has already been decreed: five years ineligibility to run for office, four years in prison (two suspended), and a fine. That puts her out of tbe running for president, and likely tarnishes her enough to keep her down even after 2030.








  • As @[email protected] said in another comment, there’s concentration and there’s flow (aka the zone).

    Concentrating takes effort, is often tiring, and requires disipline to block out distractions. It can feel good to consentrate on a problem or task, give it all your mental energy, and achieve your goal. It can be a fragile state though. If a distraction does break through it can completely disrupt your thought processes, causing you to lose track of everything you had in mind, and effectively sending you back to square one. Practice helps avoid that, but concentration is inherently mentally taxing.

    Flow is different. You will probably only reach it through concentration, and may not jnitally be aware of the transition, but you’ll know it afterwards. The complex becomes simple, stuctures untangle themselves at a thought, you feel mental clarity unlike any other time, everything you’d been struggling with becomes effortless, and time ceases to have any importance. It’s more like a trance or meditation than a normal mental state, and you can stay in that state until your body physically runs out of energy. I’ve ended up sitting at my desk for nearly 24 hours without rising, and without eating or drinking, utterly engrosed in the task at hand, not noticing the sun setting and rising again, and felt entirely calm and rested at the end of it.





  • Assembly language is not something you would ever really program a game in.

    Back then you wrote whatever you needed to be performant and/or that involved close access to the hardware in assembler. A game would definitely count. It’s kind of nice to do, in many ways it’s simpler than high level programming, you’ve just got a lot more to keep track of.


  • From the article:

    The 10-person team is trapped at the remote Sanae IV base, which is on a cliff edge about 105 miles inland from the ice shelf, by encroaching ice and weather as the southern hemisphere winter sets. Teams overwintering at the base are typically cut off for 10 months at a time. Sources told South Africa’s Sunday Times that the only way to leave the base now was via emergency medical evacuation to a neighbouring German base about 190 miles away.

    As far as I can see it’s currently the end of the Antarctic summer, winter is just starting, and will likely last until October. It sounds like something went badly wrong with both the psychological screening of the team members, and the decision for the ice breaker that delivered them to leave before the situation was resolved.



  • I have a strong suspicion that if I was suddenly attacked, my brain would dump all ideas of fighting back and just freeze, which of course allows the violence to happen.

    Find, and take, local self defence classes. Not necessarily martial arts classes (though they may be involved), but real world self defence. It’ll be grittier, nastier and much better practice. Get used to grappling and fighting in a controlled environment, and you’ll be much less likely to freeze if you need it in an emergency.

    You’re right that’ll it’ll take a long time to change at a cultural level, but that needs to start somewhere, and obe person doing it and then encouraging others could be a local catalyst.