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A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

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Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#151

Post by pcthrowaway »

foobarian wrote: post #117
pcthrowaway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be a great place to hold out with a large group if you had a way to obtain and import supplies and you cleared the building first. You'd probably be able to spot anyone coming or going (living or undead), and it would be likely that very few zombies would be in the surrounding land. Also, of course zombie fiction requires a major suspension of disbelief in this regard, but the damp/cold weather would cause t…

Given that zombies usually don't obey the laws of thermodynamics, if I lived in a place like Whittier I'd probably try to harness them to some kind of hamster wheel driving a generator.

I don't think there's enough evidence to claim that zombies don't obey the laws of thermodynamics specifically. Perhaps zombie-ism transforms something in their core into a nuclear reactor that slowly converts atoms into a near-endless supply of energy. It's apparent that they don't obey physical laws, but which ones specifically depends on your interpretation.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#152

Post by kbart »

haroldp wrote: post #144
kbart wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess there's not much to do besides studying and learning new stuff for a young, smart, introvert person in such small communities. The best and hardest working students I knew came from the tiny towns in the middle of nowhere.

I wish. Maybe that would be my story if I was a kid there now. But I left in `86. There was no Internet. There was no cable TV. Radio came in poorly. Gawddamn telephone calls were prohibitively expensive. I knew two kids that had computers at all. I played some Kings Quest on one of them, and tried to help the other with the Hitchhikers Guide game because I kind of remembered the TV movie that played out of order the…

Public libraries were Wikipedia of these times, not sure if you had one there though? I'm not talking about CS specifically, source of math, physics and other sciences are (were) easier accessible, even small school libraries usually have some extended books on these topics. Of course, it's easier to access information these days, but on the other hand, it has drawbacks too as most of youngsters waste their time on online games, social networks, 9gag etc.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#153

Post by rapidally »

bbcbasic wrote: post #31
rapidally wrote: post #24

Why is this on hackernews? Stick to tech.

Different ways of living are interesting to hackers. Life hacking. Oh no I said it!

I hope you all remember my comment when hackernews is posting 90% off-topic stuff because it's 'interesting' or politically controversial. It seems inevitable that this will become another tabloid. Down-vote me, but remember.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#154

Post by seanmcdirmid »

gambiting wrote: post #150
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a thermometer in your car? I was surprised that the buses in north east china all have this (displayed up front), as if trying to tell us how much colder it was getting :) My only experience of making that trip is in the summer. What is weird thing about china, however, is that both Changchun and Harbin are huge cities with millions of people. How could so many people live where it is so cold...the entire…

Every single new car has a thermometer built in and displays the current temperature outside on the dashboard. It's not that uncommon. I actually think it's a great safety feature for when you are driving to work in the morning and you are not sure if it's quite freezing yet or not - if your thermometer says it's less than 4C then I am more careful, but if it's above 4C then it should be fine to drive.

I've been out of the states for 10 years and haven't bought a car since '98. You don't normally see these on an intercity bus, but it was deemed important enough to have on the bus to harbin in winter, like a Chinese bullet train bragging about its current speed.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#156

Post by harel »

haroldp wrote: post #28

W00h! I grew up in Whittier, AK. Ask me Anything! Haha, seriously, I moved to Whittier at the age of 2 in 1974 and lived there until 1986. The big change there since I left has been the tunnel. When I was there you had to drive your car up onto a railroad flatcar (and pay a steep ticket price) to get out. Anchorage is only 55 miles away, but really it's two mountains away. The railroad sold passenger service only as…

I'm curious as to why people choose to live in a place like that. There are far more hospitable places to live in around the world - why would a family choose to live in a frozen remote place such as this. How is it like growing up? Did you have friends to play with? What's teenage life like? As a teenager I'd be devastated if the girl/boy ratio was skewed.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#157

Post by frik »

btilly wrote: post #146
frik wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area? Why is such an destroyed inhabited building still around 50 years later? In other parts of the world there would be many smaller buildings and inhabited ugly buildings would be removed. I like the creative use of the building in the video, great work!

Why do they build such tall buildings in an earth quake area? The basic answer is that they had no idea what kind of earthquake was possible there. That earthquake is #3 on the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Largest_ea... and was the second megathrust earthquake recorded since the geological knowledge existed to figure out what they were. (The first being Chile in 1960.)

For the destroyed building yes.

But they built a newer taller building right next to it - that's the one in linked article.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#158

Post by theoh »

lmm wrote: post #149
theoh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not one of Eric S. Raymond's talking points, but the backwoodsman aspect of hacker culture seems really important, and also, probably, fatal to its long-term spread.

How do you reconcile that with so much of hackerdom being in and around San Francisco (and a lot of the remainder being MIT)?

Well, first of all it's not a geographical description. The nature of "hacking", which is a self-reliant activity of producing provisional solutions, has a lot in common with the ethos of life in remote areas or on a frontier. Even the word hacking evokes chopping firewood or doing some other woodwork task in a rough, ad-hoc way. This is combined with a sense of mutual aid which is often present even in (maybe especially in) thinly-populated areas. Gabriella Coleman might be a good source for more insight into this. Just why hacker communities behave as if they are isolated even in an urban environment is not something I understand, but from personal experience they are self-selected groups of people with particular traits, who often have difficulty being accepted by mainstream culture, or who scorn the mainstream.

I haven't read Coleman's book, but it is available here: http://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf

(When Dijkstra talked about "coding bums" in relation to APL, he didn't mean that they would be drinking and sleeping rough...)

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#159

Post by weeksie »

haroldp wrote: post #118
weeksie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from Cordova and sometimes my dad and I would dock the boat in Whittier during closures. I remember playing connect four with Irma at the Sportsman and drink Roy Rogers (which is also where I learned how to play pool, I was between 7-14 then) Fished the sound in one way or another until I was 20 and moved away.

Oh man, I remember Ross and Irma, but I got my Roy Rogers and pool from the Anchor Inn. If I recall correctly, the Sportsman's is actually older than either the Buckner Building or Beggich Tower

Yeah, we were down at the Anchor a fair bit, too. Man, that was a long time ago. I remember my dad getting pissed with me for spending so much of his money on the Pac-Man game, so he gave me fifty cents and a milk crate, and taught me how to shoot pool.

Nice to see a fellow Alaskan kicking around on here.

Re: A town of about 200 people, almost all of whom live in the same building

#160

Post by weeksie »

saganus wrote: post #126
haroldp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, I remember Ross and Irma, but I got my Roy Rogers and pool from the Anchor Inn. If I recall correctly, the Sportsman's is actually older than either the Buckner Building or Beggich Tower

Interesting how out of the total HN population there is more than one person that lived in this very small town. Not sure what to make out of it, but certainly interesting.

I never actually lived there, but I was born in a small town across the Prince William Sound called Cordova. I came from a fishing family so we would spend much of the summer bouncing around between just anchoring up in the PWS and (often) spending fishing closures at the bar in Whittier.

I moved away when I was 20 and after a great deal of bouncing around, I've been living in New York for the last seven years. Some people just find their place, I suppose.

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