Viewing profile — hirundo

My cheap home thermostat has that frustrating +/- 5 degrees F accuracy. Is it very difficult to build an inexpensive 1 degree sensor?

Citizen Schmidt? https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/h...

Why is it "Forbidden by Gravity" but the "sub-Plankian unknown"? I thought that the Plank length was a hard limit like the speed of light. Is that not true, and there theoretically…

You could get the same distribution if everyone is assigned a random amount of selfishness regardless of wealth, but some people are better at achieving their selfish goals than ot…

Finance used to be the driver of marriage, and now that it is less so there are fewer marriages.

Wealth follows a Pareto distribution, and there are many Pareto distributions of things that are not caused by selfishness. https://www.thelangelfirm.com/debt-collection-defense-bl…

"Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause syst…

I agree. Rule of law is critical and requires consistency. But given the choice I'd rather live in a jurisdiction where law enforcement tends to use their discretion in favor of le…

We have no garbage pickup in the county, we haul it to one of four collection areas. Those cost $140/year plus about $7/100lbs, so no doubt some more thrifty neighbors are burning …

And it's self-reinforcing. I live in a rural county the size of Connecticut with just 5k people in it. The people that choose to live out here are frequently the ones who particula…

The absence of a shibboleth is a shibboleth identifying an outsider.

You just spoiled my excuse to watch Die Hard again.

I suggest that air ducts should not be considered part of Nakatomi Space. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/PlayingWith/AirVentPa... Because rather than being inventive uses o…

This is a great read, and a situation where an astute IT entrepreneur could make a fine business in return for doing much good. The main superhero power needed here is "software de…

I went shopping for a new bed the other day and hadn't for decades. So I got some future shock when I found out that they now not only have wifi and bluetooth, but also artificial …

I was standing at a Home Depot self-checkout, looking all over for an employee to help me with an item, finding nobody. The guy next to me was waiting too and I asked him "does any…

I got hired for a remote job in 2011, and have yet to meet any co-workers in the flesh, including the guy who hired me. I've spent plenty of time looking at him, talking to him. I'…

From the graphs in the article it's clear that the omitted days were very close to each other, almost a vertical line in some. That seems to indicate that these are from particular…

A two-state solution is contrary to the policy of the government elected by the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Election. No further elections have occurred. Recent events indicate th…