Viewing profile — jhbadger

In the US because of the merger of the AFL and CIO into the current AFL-CIO, "unions" in the US mean both the industrial "worker's rights" style unions like the CIO had, as well as…

And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would…

Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were st…

They should have some rivers in Montana -- probably most people's primary association of fly fishing is with Norman Maclean's autobiographical novella "A River Runs Through It" and…

Even if something is relative, you can compare it to what other people believe. If most people who know person X think X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less a…

Even speakers of more common languages like English used Latin for science. Newton wrote the Principia in Latin and William Harvey wrote De Motu Cordis (the book that showed that t…

That's what people say - that they can tell if something has been 'shopped. And maybe they can with particularly clumsy manipulation. But the fact is just with as with people claim…

One thing that people might not realize is that the waffle design is meant to remind you of the waffle design of Union Station's ceiling (which in turn was inspired by waffle ceili…

This sort of thing is older than generative AI. For the last couple of decades it has been impossible to share an interesting photograph without someone claiming that it was Photos…

Not Chicago, but I always liked listening to Feynman lecture in his working-class NYC accent.

I don't know. I think some "wonders" like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls are more impressive in aerial videos and are kind of a let down in person -- you can't really see the w…

Anyone who wants it can have Termux which gives you a full Linux experience under Android with GNU tools if you want it, though.

True, but in the Neuromancer universe they still have public pay phones and at one point the main AI keeps ringing the phones to get the main character to answer as there doesn't s…

It reminds me how at work we had to take a course hosted on our domain about how to recognize phishing and a few days later we got an e-mail from outside our domain saying we had t…

They don't even predict all the technological changes. I love how in William Gibson's Neuromancer they have VR, true AI, and even fancy orbital resorts, but not mobile phones!

I'm sure that's why mall owners like it but Bradbury was advocating it from the angle of discovering cool alleys with little shops and restaurants like you can in an old chaotic ci…

He also had interesting ideas on shopping malls of all things, hoping that they could turn into places where people would socialize besides shopping and that they should have a maz…

I think the idea is that the house had large amounts of storage and freezers that it could use to get ingredients for meals which it then cooked.

Wisconsin ("America's dairyland" according to the motto, although other states produce more these days) tries occasionally to introduce bills to prevent non-dairy beverages labelin…

Google's Go has made finding info on the ancient Chinese board game generally referred to in English by its Japanese name Go difficult. This has has interestingly lead to increased…

"Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens" Plenty of non-Chinese people study Chinese philosophy. It isn't at all irrelevant if the goal is to understand the C…

Don Lancaster did. He used to write programs in Postscript to make figures - he preferred that to using drawing programs.

While there are things like heart rate monitors that can't be replicated on a phone, I've never understood why people bring up step tracking or timers as traits of a smartwatch. My…

>While the C64 does have a cartridge and tape deck port, most games were sold on floppy disks. In the US. While disk drives were essential there, in Europe tape was standard in the…

8-bit computers had no real "OS" (well, maybe CP/M on the Z80 machines counted). That made programming very different from programming on something like Windows, which involved usi…