Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • So this has bothered me since I was a teenager.

    In Empire Strikes Back, Yoda talked like this: “Put the cart before the horse, I have.” And he mostly did it while he was pretending to be a dingus early on to test Luke’s patience. Some actual movie quotes: “I cannot teach him. The boy has not patience.” “No. Do, or do not. There is no try.” “Judge me by my size, do you?”

    In the prequel trilogy, it’s like Lucas bought into the meme that Yoda talks funny, so all of a sudden Yoda talks like this “Before the horse, the cart, I have put.” “Around the survivors, a perimeter, create!”

    Anyway.








  • You know what always weirds me out:

    The knife is a technology. It was invented by a person. And that person was not the same species as us. The knife has been around longer than Homo Sapiens.

    I’ve commented on this before, but it reminds me of the mortise and tenon joint. The oldest intact wooden structure on Earth is held together with mortise and tenon joints. The man who built it never wrote his name down, because writing hadn’t been invented yet. He never rode a horse, because animal husbandry hadn’t been invented yet. He used stone tools, because copper smelting hadn’t been invented yet. In the present day, Festool sells a tool to make mortises called the Domino which they still hold a patent on. We’re still actively developing this technology which has been with us slightly longer than civilization has.


  • There are some records which are “threaded” backwards, in that you start at the center and work out rather than start at the edge and work in. This is not standard, automatic turntables might not be able to handle this, but the reason they do this is because of the effect above. You can get greater dynamic range near the outside of the disc, and you probably want greater dynamic range near the end of the recording as the music reaches a climax. Consider Ravel’s Bolero, which is one long crescendo.