Viewing profile — shatnersbassoon

Guitar Guru is an iOS app that uses machine learning to value guitars and basses. I built this because existing methods for getting valuations all have downsides: Reverb prices are…

what do you recommend instead?

IANAL (L=lumberjack) but it's clearly going to be cheaper if you can just chop it down, right? Quicker and less equipment required, less danger to life from having to climb and wie…

I think one of the blockers to this is a very high risk of bird strikes.

It's enough explosive to cause a 2m high tsunami in the estuary, iirc. Not an option.

2 related expressions: 1. Creeping Determinism - the idea that even magical leaps forward were somehow inevitable and were anticipated. 2. Nihil Admirari - the idea that wisdom is …

If you go to the Bolivian part of Lake Titicaca (home of the Bolivian navy), there is a statue with a sword pointing West saying something along the lines of "We are going to take …

`TELETUBBIES = TeletubbiesCheat` Intriguing... what does this do?

It's the Scunthorpe problem all over again

It's presented in Gigawatts here, but I expect the actual metric is probably something like "Gigawatts available for 99th centile of duration of demand peaks", as this would allow …

There's quite a big difference between the DNA you leave in a forensic sense all around you (which would take a lot of effort and expense for someone to gather against your will) v…

Given the nature of the service, you should probably treat it as inherently pseudonymous. You're handing over irrevocable genetic data which will link you to relatives. Whatever th…

"When a failsafe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe." J. Gall

> I'd like to see some stats to back this up, considering the IUCN has taken the bluefin off its "red list," No they haven't. Nothing gets taken off the Red List (e.g. the Brown Ra…

I like the Alan Partridge definition of brainstorming: "An American technique where ideas are graded by how loudly the person who thought them up shouts" (paraphrase)

If you read enough of those "day in the life" articles in newspapers about the daily routine of famous/successful people, you realise that they are probably complete fabrications. …

Not all our timber. In fact Scotland is ~73% self-sufficient in timber production. https://scotland.forestry.gov.uk/images/corporate/pdf/Hbook0...

I made this single page site to resolve this obvious question, with the ridiculously obscure answer. I had searched for half an hour, and eventually found the page by guessing the …

Thomas Cromwell was the most prominent spymaster of Tudor times and letters to him feature heavily here. So not all of it is bulk surveillance, some of it seems to be old-fashioned…

My point is that the claims in these studies are held to high standards by detractors, but when it comes to the critiques, just saying "developing countries have high prevalence of…

^ 100%

Casually announcing that everyone in this city has worms on the basis of zero evidence and deciding you can therefore ignore this paper is not the win you think it is.

Oh yes, the Cambodia that didn't turn communist in the 70s and execute millions of people for wearing glasses? Totally disincentivized.