Viewing profile — jbattle

I just want to say it blows my mind we're likely to literally land on the moon before we get a proper KSP 2

Crawford's work that I'm most familiar with is a game called Balance of Power - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game) I played it as a cold war kid and was fa…

Biden's inaugural address was full of this "To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me sa…

I dread the idea. The leaf blowers running nonstop 10 months a year are noisy enough. Maybe I can convince all my neighbors to fly barrage balloons in all the back yards.

Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or ma…

I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize “cavemen” had come before? I saw this guy on youtube talking s…

Lake Michigan is BIG. The location of this thing isn't public but Chicago is closer to Cleveland than the middle of Grand Traverse Bay. Washington DC and NYC are closer together th…

I'd argue that a suite of tests that exercise all reasonably likely scenarios is table stakes. And would have caught this particular bug. I'm not talking about 100% branch coverage…

create a subscription for a test user. delete it. Make sure you can create another subscription for the same user. create subscriptions with and without overlapping effective windo…

There are only 12,000 coal miners in WV. Only 45,000 in the whole US. Obviously there are a large cast of others supporting the miners directly and indirectly (e.g. truck drivers, …

There's an old video game called Seven Cities of Gold wherein you play a european explorer poking about the new world. It has procedurally generated game worlds, and claims to use …

I have little fear about AI generating propaganda. It's cheap to write a crappy article and fake a photo or two - or choose a real photo but twist the story around the photo. What …

I'll throw in a couple more good pieces of music by Ethiopians: This is from an album of older pop music. From the little I've read this is something like live bar music. https://w…

Assuming abundant power and effective carbon recapture / recycling, how much carbon do you need per person? If it was on the order of 50 lbs of carbon per person, and that could be…

Fabulous writing - I have tons of work to do tonight but read both parts, chuckling the whole way down and up the Mississippi.

To be pedantic, these aren't really the "ancient Egyptians" people usually imagine. King Ramses and Tut and that lot. When these people were buried, Egypt had already been ruled by…

If you have a VR headset, VTOL VR is amazing. All the controls you interact with by reaching out and flipping toggles. The graphics are good enough. You get three aircraft with the…

In the 'Once and Future King', the boy who will be King Arthur looses an arrow into the air, just for the joy of it. A crow comes out of nowhere and grabs the arrow. Art's foster b…

What's the difference in this case? Doesn't seem too different from how camouflaged eggs would have developed (maybe just faster because the selection mechanism is so strong). When…

> In other words, it could well be by nature, that recognizing black faces is harder than pale faces under the normal camera and scene settings. This might be the crux. Why are pal…

I disagree. Obvs D&D evolved out of a literal wargame (chainmail). And there are a lot of influences from wargaming, but 90% of the focus (from the beginning) was on: - Characters …

I always tell my wife to bury me without a casket, wearing tanned animal skins, covered in shells and with a bunch of flint arrowheads scattered around. Just to give some archeolog…

Really good question actually! I peeked at the javascript and it looks like when you hit `run`, it is calling the step at a setInterval (if I'm reading this right, as fast as the b…

To be fair, Cahokia was (if I remember right) the only large city for literally 1000 miles. If anything that impresses me all the more - these people may have spontaneously invente…

Given how long governments have kept records (domesday book, bablylon) and how few governments have slipped into totalitarian hellscapes, I'm not as worried about this as you are. …