This article proposes a pretty crazy sounding idea - remove the Van Allen Belts.
Simplified Explanatory Summary:
The Van Allen Belts are a natural phenomenon, electrons and protons flying around the Earth at high speed. Electrical current is essentially electrons moving around, so when astronauts or satellites pass through these regions the effect is shocking. Passing through the proton regions is even worse because they’re comparatively mass-ive. Electrons and protons are normally flying around in space, but these ones are trapped by Earth’s magnetic field.
This article in The Economist summarizes most of the issues relevant to this whole Edward Snowden debacle. Their attitude is that the amount of secret surveillance going on in the US, as suggested by the current news cycle, makes democracy difficult. It’s worth a skim just to make sure you’re not missing some chunk of the debate and recent history. The Economist is about as much a disinterested third party as I can think of.
Apparently San Antonio has a hackerspace now. Up until a few minutes ago, this image was alongside the rest of their “About Us” page. I think that by observing the page I changed it, so perhaps it’s a quantum webpage.
Leia’s going to cut her tongue if she’s not careful.
Anyway, these are a bunch of nerds interested in ham radio, building hardware and software, and talking about all these things. This makes me even more excited to head back to SA. I don’t want to lose this nerdy motivation I’ve got right now, as a consequence of school, and I guess this seems like an appropriate environment to cultivate that.
Oh, LaTeX acronym package, you won’t automatically alphabetize my list of acronyms? Strange… Let’s see if Unix will…
$ echo "\acro{SCADA}{Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition}
\acro{PLC}{Programmable Logic Controller}
\acro{RTU}{Remote Terminal Unit}
..." > toSort
$ for i in `cat toSort |sed "s/.*\\acro{\(.*\)}.*{.*}/\1/" | sort`;
do grep "{$i}" toSort; done
\acro{ADC}{analog to digital converter}
\acro{API}{application programming interface}
\acro{APT}{Advanced Persistent Threat}
\acro{ASCII}{American Standard Code for Information Interchange}
...
Somebody gave this post on BuzzFeed the title, “How to Date Anywhere in the Country,” but really it should be called, “How to Have an Awesome Weekend in the Biggest Cities in the Country”. That’s not as catchy I guess. For San Antonio it mentions the Flying Saucer, Ranger Creek Brewery, the Japanese Tea Gardens, and Candlelight Coffee. Chicago - Millenium Park and the Art Museum. Cleveland - Great Lakes Brewery… Austin - Zilker Park, the Drafthouse…
This article in the Atlantic struck a chord with me. It’s about how, in life, searching for meaning can leave people more satisfied than searching for happiness.
As [Viktor Frankl] saw in the [concentration] camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing”.
Meaning, more than happiness, is long-term. The article describes our modern meaning for happiness as a satisfaction of needs and wants. When those needs and wants cease to be satisfied, that happiness turns out to have only been temporary. Meaning in life, the article describes, requires considering more than just the needs and wants of the moment.
Some times I’m not sure whether I’m trying to flirt with someone or not. The coffee shop was playing some crazy music from all over the World, like, a French song followed by some crazy Spanish dudes shouting to a dance tune.
“Heh, this music… right?” Surely anybody would agree this was a crazy mix.
“I kinda like it…” she said.
“Yeah, it’s alright…” This reply doesn’t require any thought. I put my foot in my mouth so often, this reply is just a reflex at this point.
So, I just had a reason to implement something like a dictionary in Bash. Of course, I could try to determine if such a feature exists already (it does in Bash 4, alas the default on OS X seems to be 3.2), but why not just try to hack something together?
So, that’s ridiculous. Basically, the values are set in code with the dictionary name “OFFSETDICT”, and the key as whatever comes after the name {keyUno, keyTres, …}. Then the value line builds a variable lookup and executes it. That’s pretty lazy of me to write it like that, so here’s a function (a Bash function - so terrible).
The back of a truck is an appropriate place to watch a meteor shower. I had driven out onto a back road in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to watch the meteors fall, and I was not disappointed. Orion knew where most of them were coming from - he was calling the shots.
I had barely pulled off the two-lane dirt road and onto some tire tracks in the grass. A run-down barbed wire fence with old knotty posts ran alongside the road, and was only a few feet from the truck. Fortunately, some farmer had left room for me.
