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Shirt colors

What if the disposable crew members had other color shirts? Redshirt - gets shot in the first encounter and dies. Pinkshirt - like the redshirt but gay. The landing party takes the time to Bury Their Gay . Yellowshirt - survives the first shot long enough to make one ferocious attack, then dies. Orangeshirt - shoots themselves for having to wear such a garish color. Whiteshirt - keeps telling the landing party not to stray from the path of good and law until Captain Kirk gets annoyed and shoots them. Greenshirt - gets shot while protecting a piece of exoflora. Blueshirt - gets shot while trying to mediate a truce between the locals and the landing party. Blackshirt - overthrows the local king in a coup, installs a puppet dictator, then gets shot when the landing party overthrows the dictator. Purpleshirt - gets mistaken for the leader of the landing party and installed as king of the local realm, then gets shot in a coup. Greyshirt - stays in the background giving advice to the captain...
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Variations on "My Mother Told Me"

Because sometimes songs get stuck in my head and start to mutate. Thanks to Mickey for the idea for the last one. My mother told me Some days she would buy Longships with good oars Sail to distant shores.  My mother told me Some days she would find Long ships with bad oars Washed up on the shores. My mother told me Someday I would buy A spaceship with good cores Fly to distant shores.
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Electronicsrelated links of interest

Circuit board programs worth looking into as the next one after Fritzing (from comments on this HN post ): - KICAD - will require significant learning - HorizonEDA - flux.ai
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Space-related links of interest

Since I find Pinterest to be loathsome and don't have any better alternative, I'll just start running blog posts of links of interest. This one everything space-related. https://everydayastronaut.com/rocket-engine-cycles/ is a good rundown of the various kinds of rocket engines, what the trade-offs are, and where each of them has found use. Only thing missing is years on the various rockets mentioned.
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My childhood's cannibal chickens and their armor-grade eggs

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There was (and still is) a little tool shed in my childhood garden that also had a chicken coop. My parents had built the house before I was born, but had inherited the shed and coop from the previous property owner, who had kept pigeons there. The shed had been given the name "Valeria" (meaning "What are you laughing at?"), because the owner wanted something to match his brother-in-law's very fancy garden but didn't quite match the quality. At some point, I think when I was 8 or so, I convinced my parents to get some new chickens that I would take care of. Given the size of the coop, they had to be dwarf chickens. They had mostly free run of the garden, and occasionally the neighbor's when they found a hole in the chicken wire fence we had set up.  Mostly we had them for the eggs. We tried eating one, but since it was not a youngling any more, it was rather tough. My dad and me did the killing together, not sure who swung the axe - probably him. The eg...
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Non-deterministic algorithms explained using Stadia State Share

 One of the big open questions in computer science is known as " P = NP ", meaning the question of whether (the default deterministic) P olynomial algorithms can solve the same problems as N on-deterministic P olynomial algorithms. We computer scientists are lazy fuckers who compress 40 letters into 2. Countless hours has gone into not just the research on this, but also on just wrapping your head around what "non-deterministic algorithms" really means. An algorithm is just an extremely detailed recipe for doing stuff. Non-deterministic? Does that mean you get to throw dice? Or does it depend on there not being a predetermined fate known only to a higher being? Video games to the rescue! Stadia has introduced a feature called " State Share ", in which you can share not just a screenshot or a video clip, but the entire state of the game that you're playing. Other players who own that game can then pick up from there and keep playing. Maybe later they...
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A pair of pauldrons

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Back in 2019, I decided to finally make some leather pauldrons (technically they're spaulders, not having the extra protection against stabs into the armpit). I succeeded, but they ended up with a fatal design flaw that I have yet to fix - see the end. These are the notes from making them.   The core leather from Leder Hofmann is about 6mm thick, which makes it hard to work with. I don't know where I can get some ~4.5mm leather. I use a Blechschere (tin snips) to cut it. Even dedicated leather scissors are having a hard time with this, but are good for trimming edges. It takes a bit of getting used to how to use it without making a lot of little notches along the edge. One trick is to bend the leather where it hits the scissors so it doesn't press the scissors at an angle. Making many small nibs with the tip seemed to work well. I made holes for rivets with a combination of a regular hand-held rivet punch and a punch tool, both 4mm. The hand riveter, with plenty of f...
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