It’s really weird rewatching MythBusters at this point, because the show is so heavily structured around ad breaks. It starts with a teaser that includes clips of moments that will happen in the show, then it has an overview of the myths, then it splits into the A myths and the B myths. Each of these gets touched on, then there’s a preview of what will happen in the next segment after the ad, then there’s the implied break, then there’s a review of what happened before the break, then there’s a new piece… it’s constantly revisiting and excerpting things to blow up about 15 minutes of content into a 50-minute show.

Back then it all seemed so normal…

That was the joke. The link I was replying to was talking about how Trump always says everything will be happening “in two weeks.”

He keeps hearing that fortnights are all the rage with the kids these days.

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They weren’t pushing for credit card processors to block payments for specific games. They were pushing for the payment processors to block money to Steam entirely, which is why Steam caved and instead removed a small list of games. It was a compromise to allow credit card companies to keep doing business with them. Overall it’s pretty small potatoes–a small but vocal group, a small and worthless collection of games. People are understandably worried about the precedent of giving in to censorship at the demand of a group like this, but there are enough things to worry about right now that I’m not going to give it much thought until I hear the slope has slipped further than this.

It was the Long Island Ice Tea Corp., which changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp.

https://www.ft.com/content/2ef64f85-18b4-3538-b67e-7fe8ccc4e5e5

Edit: Or the SkyPeople Fruit Juice company. https://www.inquisitr.com/two-months-later-whats-happening-in-companies-with-blockchain-name-changes

The year is 2060. I’m getting ready to watch my favorite movie. I have no idea what it’s about; my NeuraLink prevents me from retaining unlicensed memories of someone else’s intellectual property. But Amazon tells me I’ve watched it over thirty times and given it an average of 4.7 stars over those viewings, which is crazy high; even stuff other people like I tend to rate under 3 stars. Apparently I’m snobby, or maybe some kind of pervert. Without more information about the content, I have no practical way of knowing. If you go on the dark web supposedly you can find forums where people will write descriptions of what they claim the films are like, but folks who have sought that stuff out consistently rate the films lower on subsequent viewings, so it’s probably not worth it. At least that’s what my AI assistant tells me.

Thanks! I haven’t actually published these pieces yet. (Well, the slide-glide cyclide thing was published by someone else, but I think it was later taken down–there may be plans for the original mathematician to sell them?) The puzzle box is just a little too kluged together to really publish; I modified a lot of things after the fact to get it together, and I’m not comfortable publishing it in that state, but I also don’t really want to put in the work to finish it. The kaleidoscope would actually be okay, but it’s limited–it’s a bit tricky to actually cut the mirrors, and it really only works to reflect things right up against it. I want to design an adapter for it that will hold an acrylic sphere (which you can get inexpensively from China) so that you can use it to look at scenes as well. But I haven’t actually gotten around to that yet either. I’ll give some thought to publishing it as-is, though.

I dunno. I agree with this to some extent for sure–I don’t print a lot of the meme models that are everywhere on 3d printing forums. But there are toys that would not exist without 3d printing that I think are pretty great.

I designed a kaleidoscope that reflects things not to tile a plane, but instead to tile the surface of a disdyakis triacontahedron: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-kaleidoscope-P4atHey I had to cut the mirrors from acrylic by hand, but the templates for them and the shell that holds them in place are all 3d printed. And that thing is a pretty great toy.

This thing: https://imgur.com/gallery/make-of-cyclidial-iris-by-vergo-henry-segerman-XHN4MC0

is a math sculpture that I didn’t design, just printed, but it’s completely beautiful, and it’s had real staying power as both a toy and a decoration. It sits out on our coffee table all the time, but my niece plays with it every time she’s over here.

And this puzzle box I designed: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-puzzle-box-nieces-birthday-U1q408R

was a big hit with her too. I’m not sure if she’ll continue to play with it long-term, but based on my own tendencies as a kid, I think she might end up investigating the mechanisms involved for some time to come.

Things that you could buy at the store you’re generally better off buying at the store. But there are things it’s not economical to mass produce, and it never used to be possible to design and make your own toys. Both ideosyncratic toys and bespoke toys are pretty great uses of 3d printing in my opinion.

But physical games that doesn’t require online would work fine.

Do we know this for sure? On the original Switch, when new games came out, they often would refuse to play until you updated the firmware on the console. So depending on whether they allow banned consoles to update their firmware, offline games might not work either.

I use an emulated version of my old calculator. Once you get used to RPN, nothing else really seems fit for purpose.

“If only I’d programmed the robot to be more careful what I wished for. Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!”

Really! I find that fascinating.

When I try to think of a tune (often because I haven’t recalled the lyrics yet and am still trying to identify the song), I am just listening to the song in my head, trying to think of the notes and instrumentation of the next bit. I hear it, like a recording.

When I try to throw something–I said basketball because I figured it would be more relatable, but the sport I actually played was Ultimate (Frisbee, but that’s a trademark, so the sport is just Ultimate)–I’m picturing the path of the disc, how it will arc on the wind, the precise angle, how to roll it off my fingers, how long it will be in the air and how far to lead the runner. It’s a struggle to even come up with words for it now. It all feels visceral, the same as thinking how to reach my hand out to touch a glass on a table.

It’s hard for me to imagine using words for those kinds of things because words are so vague and general. Words deal with categories we impose on the world, rather than the world as it is. Like, I learned to juggle as a teenager; I could never do that if I had to use words to think about every way to maneuver my arms and how the balls would land and so forth. I just have to reach where the ball is going to be, and throw where my hand is going to be. When I first learned Mills’ Mess, I got it mixed up a bit (because I was learning from a VHS tape), and I had an extra throw in there. It took me quite a while to figure out how I mixed it up, and how to do it without that extra throw. But it was a spatial puzzle. I wouldn’t even know how to convey the issue in detail without just doing it.

I dunno. I shouldn’t be surprised that people’s inner lives are very different, but this particular point confounds me a bit.

When you’re thinking about how to throw a basketball to get it through a hoop, do you use words for that?

When you are thinking of the tune to a particular song, is that in words?

I think a lot of people overestimate the role of words in thinking. There’s a lot of non-verbal thought.

I dunno. I think a lot of regular people felt really strongly that it was critical that the Republicans not gain control of everything in this last election, and given how things are going at the moment, it’s really hard to argue that was wrong. Which is not to say that the folks criticizing the Democrats were wrong either! The Democrats’ feckless centrism and undermining of leftist candidates has been galling for years. The difficult truth is that the system has been so broken that really good people following genuine motivations were arguing on both sides of the leftist/Democrat divide. I was trying to cling to the hope that if we jollied the current system along, we could get reforms like ranked choice voting and the national vote interstate compact in place that would help shift the underlying incentives in the system away from the two-party system, but it’s probably really been irreparable for years now.

Of course bullying people was never going to be an effective tactic, and I never endorsed that. But that’s just regular tribalism and anger at the nonconformist. That’s just regular dumb human stuff.

I mostly agree with this–I commented not long ago in another thread that the political situation in the US has convinced me not to seek any diagnosis right now. But I would say that there can be reasons that aren’t specific to medication in particular that you might want a diagnosis. Sometimes there are non-medication accommodations that you can get (e.g. at work) with a diagnosis that they might not be open to giving you without one. Sometimes this can be huge! I’ve had times where I was in two different different locations in the same office at different times, and in one, half my field of view was taken up by a throughway where people walked across the office, and in the other my view was against a wall and behind a little corner of wall, and I got so much more work done in the second spot. It was just tremendously less overstimulating. So the prospect of being able to get that kind of issue taken seriously is part of what tempted me about seeking diagnosis.

I think this might be more what they’re looking for.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png

GNU Terry Pratchett

Yes, to an extent they do different things, but that’s not what the person you were replying to was talking about. For several years there was this idea that “left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and right-handed people are left-brain dominant.” And along with that went this whole astrology-tinged thing about the right brain being the creative half and the left brain being the analytic half and whatnot. It’s pretty much nonsense.

The “Scunthorpe Problem” strikes again!