Thought Bloggles

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...

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.

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

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.

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...

 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...

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...

They didn't seem to consider the human imagination and creativity. Just look at Leonardo da Vinci - he came up with an insane amount of things that there were no words for. And humans have been creating quite elaborate imaginary beings and stories forever. Did S&W not know of science fiction? Just because I wanted to prove a point, one morning while getting up, I came up with three different concepts that are so different from my experience and language that I should not have been able to think of them. On a phase-locked planet, whenever there is a solar eclipse, the constant hurricanes slow down for a while, allowing brave people with heavy heat shields to venture further into the hot side to gather metals. This is extremely dangerous, of course. Especially while the shield is not loaded down with metals, if it tips it can get picked up by the wind and smash into the person. There can also be invisible pools of molten material than can cause this tipping. The best gatherers ar...

Butter is important in American baking, but not in the way you may think.  I've been doing all these low carb versions of various things, and have hit upon the Butter Brioche Batter Bread from the Fannie Farmer cookbook as a simple, delicious, and more balanced bread. It's essentially one-third flower, one-third butter, one-third eggs. When getting ready to bake another one of this quite delicious recipe, I pondered the weight of these ingredients, and the weight of the butter is 227g, which is rather an odd number.  For those of you who have not been unfortunate enough to have to deal with American measurements, 1 cup is 8 fluid ounces (fl. oz.), 1 fl. oz. is 2 tablespoons (tbsp), and 1 tbsp is 3 teaspoons (tsp). Yes, it's that confusing, and that's even leaving out the two other kinds of ounces. With an American wife and the American centric internet, we've had to do conversions so much that we got little fridge magnets with the factors. Only today did I realize t...

My recent bread-making has been plagued by a series of disasters, punctuated by not-quite-disasters, but hardly ever anything great like my original 1:1 bread . I read up on various aspects of baking, tried adding less liquid, using warmer water, adding more flour, and various other tweaks, all to no avail. The pattern was that the first rise would be fine, the second rise so-so, but then instead of a great oven spring, the bread would actually deflate in the oven. A very sad experience. Today I looked back at the old recipe, and noticed that it had used flax-seed flour instead of sunflower seed flour ("sunflour"). I changed to the latter because I found the taste of the flax seed flour to be a bit more savory than what I was shooting for. However, looking at my flour tests , I realized the sunflour seed hadn't risen nearly as well as the flax-seed flour. So that could well be my problem! Before going back to the flax-seed flour, I tried one last trick that I had seen i...

I needed a new workbench. One where my printer could live, where tools and spare parts could be organized, but also where the work surface wouldn't get cluttered or take too much of the space in my room. I started looking around at secretaries and similar, which have the right concept, but never the right size. Eventually I realized I had to do it myself. These are my notes. I used an IKEA Hemnes side table, two Hemnes night stands, and the top part of the two-part Hemnes writing desk. The two night stands on top of the side table, and the writing desk part on top of them, like the cross slab of a megalith, done in wood plank furniture. That part was simple enough, except I didn't want the gaps under the night stands, so I cut a bit of the logs, but cut too much, so now I need to fill some gaps. I'll probably print something eventually. But here's the basic setup: Hemnes, Hemnes everywhere. But they are clearly not designed to go together like these, the sizes don...

Despite taking a minor in mathematics, I never really grokked matrices. I didn't even realize why it's called linear algebra (or at least I forgot quickly). These blog posts do a good job of making them more intuitive to me: The basics of matrices: https://dhruvp.netlify.com/2018/12/31/matrices / Eigenvectors: https://dhruvp.netlify.com/2018/12/31/matrices /

Yoghurt with müsli is a fixed part of my breakfast since I was a kid. A morning just isn't right without it. Unfortunately, the müsli makers are not exactly trying to make low-carb müslis in general - mostly they combine cereals with sugars and call it healthy because there's a smidge of fiber in there. A few high-protein müslis have started to appear, mostly based on soy protein, and so far universally boring in taste and texture. So, following the lead of my mother, I have started making my own, adding things for texture and protein as I feel fit. According to my calculations, this has a 2.27:1 carb:protein balance, 1.83:1 if you count fibers as negative carbs ("effective carbs"). That is already a lot better than the typical 6:1 or 7:1 of standard müslis. Effectively Carb-Balanced Müsli 100g coarse oats 100g fine oats 100g raisins 100g hazelnuts, whole 100g sunflower seeds 50g flax seeds 50g corn flakes With ingredients from our local grocery store, thi...

My recent breads have been of a good structure and have risen nicely, but have almost invariably fallen again when baked. I tried some variations in flour combination and amount of kneading, but to no avail. Then I thought, maybe there's just not enough there  to keep up the holes made by (mostly) steaming water. After all, while I use 500g of flour with 350g of water, I also thereto add about 150g of mostly water in the form of eggs, plus up to 50ml of oil, and some water in the soaked seeds. That adds up. So for this bread, I decided to use less water and add more flour, to see if the dough would form up more and stand up better while rising. I used 50g gluten, 150g wheat flour (type 550), 150g whole-wheat flour, and 150g sunflower seed flour, a scant tablespoon salt, 50g soaked seed mix, 50g walnuts, 300ml warm water, 20g yeast cake, 3 large eggs, and 20ml oil. Then while kneading, I added another 250g of the type 550 flour, getting the dough from super-sticky to only somewhat...

This year's Sotahuuto has some really good strategists. This is one example where the outcome particularly surprised me. See the video here: https://youtu.be/T1I22U5nEbY?t=3032 There are two sides in this battle, but each side is split in two starting points. The side I was on has (among many others) Imperiumii Etelan in black and purple as well as Gobliniit in off-green. The other side most notable has Mahekainen in blue and white with a red blazon. The field is roughly rectangular and has a small dense forest off-center, and the half of our army I was in started in the corner farthest from the forest, while the other half was behind the forest, with the opposing armies in the other two corners. At the start of the video, you see the opposing forces that were on our right when looking into the middle. Our strategy was (roughly) to move as fast as at all possible across to the forest, presumably (I wasn't there for the strategizing) to meet the other half. The opponents...

I've had a string of failures with my bread recently. They just don't rise much, most of the time - once or twice they rose nicely, but most of the time they're kinda flat. Not inedibly flat, mind you, but flat enough that they aren't very enticing, not that great for things like french toast, let alone bread pudding. I have a number of hypotheses of why this could be, but rather than trying them meticulously one at a time and keep making uninspiring bread, I decided to throw them all in at once, check that I got something that works, then go from there. So I took my standard bread recipe (except I see now I've been using 3 eggs most of the time where this post said 2, as did my older 1:1 bread post ) and made the following changes: In case the yeast has too little starch to feast on: Drop the flax seed flour (which has a rather strong taste also) and increase regular flours instead. In case the walnuts contain something inhibiting the yeast: Drop the walnuts...

The Kreuzpflicht  has now become the law of my adopted home state, requiring crosses to be on display in all public buildings. As an avowed atheist (there's enough trouble in the world already without having to come up with supernatural trouble) and constitutionalist, this troubles me greatly. But what can one do? It's the law, right? Here are some ways you can stay within the law and help avoid enforced religion. As a private person, your options are limited: - Take the cross off its hook and leave it on a table. Or under a table. Under a chair. In a remote corner. As long as you don't take it with you, it's not theft. - Bring an extra hook and mount it on the bottom of the cross . - Hang other religious symbols near the cross. Sticky-tack is nice for quick mounting. As someone in charge of a public building, the possibilities are nigh endless: - Hang the cross in the company of other religious symbols. For agnostics, add a question mark, for atheists th...

Furthering my inquiries into high-protein baking, I tried out a recipe for no less than the "Ultimate" keto burger buns . Based on my previous experience, I didn't have high hopes for it turning it as ultimate as indicated. Sure enough, what the recipe calls a "batter" that can be poured into the forms turned into a sticky dough that had to be scraped out with a spatula and sat stiffly in the forms. After 18 minutes of baking, as suggested, they were nicely browned, but didn't rise much, and were tough and crumbly: This recipe, however, has a link to the (an) almond flour, and in one of the pictures the nutrition info was visible (not explicitly listed, alas), and it listed about 50% fat, where my almond flour comes with 10%, having being partly de-oiled. So I figured - maybe adding back some fat would help? Thus experiment #1: To a half recipe I added 50 g of canola oil. I also instead of the staff blender used the exceedingly handy beater whisk from...

Oddly, I've been doing bullet journaling for 15 months and only now got around to watching the original video that introduced the concept in August 2013 (I was several years behind this particular trend). I no longer remember which page I took my original style from, possibly this updated version , but there are some differences: The original bullet journal (OBJ) uses boxes for tasks and dots for notes, whereas I've followed the updated version (UBJ) with dots for tasks and dashes for notes. Originally, done tasks were marked with a checkmark in the box, the updated version uses an 'x', I turn the dot into a checkmark - checkmarks look more "done" than 'x'es. The "migration" marks work differently in both OBJ and UBJ: A forward angle means it's moved from a day to the next month , while a backward angle means it's moved to the long-term list. Since I have four, count them, four, levels of lists (daily, "soon" (roughly w...

I just made the Low-Carb Carrot Cake from ditchthecarbs.com. I used Xylitol as sweetener, added another tsp of vanilla (because that's almost always a good idea), and used a heaping tablespoon of "Mickey's Five-spice" instead of the other spices. The batter was quite satisfying and not very sweet, but the cream cheese frosting part of the recipe is all manner of wrong. The carb/protein ratio is really good, we could use 50/50 whole-wheat and almond flour and still be balanced. Let's see the results: It set fine, but was somewhat dense and dry, falling apart too easily. It was not very sweet at all, possibly due to using a sweetener with a different amount of sweetening power But what I really want to write about is the process, and how this was the most stress-free baking experience ever. I think of it as "prepare and repair". The "prepare" part is also beautifully known as " mise en place " ([mi zɑ̃ ˈplas]) and basically mean...