Viewing profile — thx11389793

The trillion/year I believe was in reference to military expenditures.

my personal method when out and about is "ask a stranger," with using my hand computer as a backup. i delight in answering these questions as well, so i'm inclined to believe peopl…

Neal Stephenson has done world building involving megacorporations that devolve into semi-feudal colonies. His style is goofier than Gibson's gritty realism but worth reading.

Protip: if you find a crap product that's being shilled for in the reviews, you can talk your way into getting paid decently for your silence. I know someone who was paid several h…

I went surfing with a friend a couple years ago. I made an error while donning the wetsuit and ended up irretrievably wedging my head into the sleeve. Had to have my friend unwedge…

autorotation requires control of blade pitch.

my cursory research seems to indicate that it's pretty reasonable to start a local wireless ISP, with a lower bound wrt minimum number of clients to make the venture worth it being…

I came across an old copy of this when I was in grade school. Early aughts. Finding those books may well have put me on the path to where I am now (embedded hardware eng)

If you've been holding onto a LOT, it's possible to spend the entire length of the experience processing everything you've lived up to that point. I've seen it in first-time MDMA e…

MrLeap did a great job explaining this. If I were to add anything, it would be to echo the recommendation to take a class if you're really starting from nothing. Two things are rea…

it's a reference to Eisenhower's famous 1953 speech

it's all fun and games until someone figures out they can make cigarette butts and turn them in for money

fabrication, welding, juggling, playing music, working on and riding motorcycles, doing acid in the woods. it takes some doing but it's well worth the effort to move your leisure t…

Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may ge…

is this actually a legit synthesis? as a non-chemist it has the air of plausibility, author names and quips aside.

mine (etymotic) came with a small squeeze to open coin-pouch thing, maybe 5cm by 8cm. it disappears pretty well into a jeans pocket. expect to pay 100-200 for custom molded ones. i…

commonly accomplished by smoking a largish joint beforehand.

While the materials don't quite exist for a tether that can survive the forces needed to escape Earth gravity, the wiki you linked mentions the moon as a place where current materi…

This is an important idea in performance vehicle design - in a crash, the 'capsule' around the occupant must not be compromised. You see this pretty vividly in bad F1 crashes. Gran…

It occurs to me that we haven't quite done away with cubicles, we have instead shrunk them down to the size of our heads, in the form of noise cancelling headphones.

I worked in a highrise office that had TVs ringing the floor that you could remote into to display dashboards and whatnot. One day I decided to play, on mute, endless episodes of H…

If we have a hundred years to burn, how about reorganizing our cities into forms that obviate the need for cars (self-driving or not) in the first place? Anecdotally, I've heard pe…

OT, but why are immigrants called expats when they're from anglophone nations?

I'm a motorcyclist. I've had the misfortune of flying through the air because someone didn't bother looking before making a left hand turn. The literal mantra of riding a motorcycl…

I've known people to freeze bagels. Apparently they toast more or less equivalently compared to bagels stored above freezing.