54 thoughts on “Let Them Eat Memes

      1. It is maybe kinda hard to explain to analog IC engineers, because Bob Widlar has a positive reputation where his designs are concerned.

        Anyway, I absolutely do not know digital or analog or mixed-signal IC design enough to have a good analogy.

        And the IC research right now maybe absolutely needs to be as wild and extreme as it is.

        Anyway, the civil engineering world is profoundly opposite of electrical engineering, and especially the IC technologies, where change and thus conventional wisdom is concerned.

        I have the impression that firearms, especially small arms, are about three quarters of the way to civil engineering from electrical engineering.

        Bob Widlar was a genius and maybe insane, and was an alcoholic who probably ruined his health and maybe his maximum intellectual potential with drink, but he was a genius, and a skilled designer.

        Keltec, the drugs seem to be hyperbole, and they are creative, but maybe not genius, and maybe also not in a position where designers genuinely need to be that innovative. Also, unlike RFIC designers back in the day, half or entirely insane genius is not an entry level requirement to get good at firearms design.

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        1. I worked at Nat’l Semi after Bob semi-retired, but was still consulting and designing for the ALIC (advanced linear IC) department. His drinking was legendary–someone challenged him at the Lawrence Station bar. After drinking the challenger under the table, Bob (it was said–I wasn’t there) said, “Now let’s do some serious drinking.”

          Tales of speeches given with the glass of water replaced with one of ethanol were widespread and quite believable. Then and there, alcohol was the drug of choice. I left while I still had some sanity left, though the next outfit was only a bit better. Missed alcoholism, but might have been close. Don’t drink now, don’t miss it.

          ALIC wasn’t a fun place to work for me, but it had more than a fair share of colorful characters.

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        2. The Keltec P32 and P3AT are very good value for discreet polymer pocket pistols in minor calibers.

          They work.

          Light, small, dependable. Locked breech action, so less recoil and less effort to cycle, compared to the typical blowback designs of that size.

          Can’t vouch for their bigger stuff. Avoid that dual-magazine shotgun for “social purposes”. It’s a fussy feeder.

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          1. Did not like the P3XX platform. Maybe my hands were too big to manipulate the controls of my AT safely. Had a problem with the magazine dropping out of position; the unguarded mag release seemed to pop at the slightest touch, or if you breathed on it, or if you looked at it funny. Having your sidearm going Bang once instead of several times at a moment of gravest extreme seemed to me to be – contraindicated . . .

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            1. I like my P3AT. An extended magazine makes it fit a little better. MadMike has a double stack version of that platform that I found…punishing to shoot. The squared off back strap made recoil painful.

              YMMV

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  1. My first cat was a Balinese (Siamese mutant; I called her an X-kitty). When I had to travel I’d board her. And every time, I knew when they took her out of her cage and put her into the carrier, because the singing would start. It would grow louder and louder until I took the carrier, and then remain constant until I got home. I finally decided what I was hearing was,

    “Where on earth have you been?

    What have you been doing?

    There’s another cat, isn’t there?”

    But she’d get quiet when I let her out and in an hour or so she’d forgive me. I miss her.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. “Guys, I barely know nothing about firearms design, but I just kinda wonder if the gun people take mocking Keltec too far.”

    First presenter shows what they think is reasonable work in topics that are not firearms.

    Average gun person: “Aha, there is your problem right there.”

    Anyway, I genuinely have mixed feelings about Kel-Tec, but feel it is fair for people to criticize design art.

    People would have to explain to me why Kel-Tec designs are wrong, but I do think it is good for some engineers to take a few steps away from what everyone does by rote, as long as they don’t kill anyone with their mistakes.

    (What if Shikashima was hired by Kel-Tec, produced some truly awful designs there, and later was involved in a self defensive shooting where he protected his own life, or that of others, with a design that is ugly and unreliable and unergonomic?)

    (Answer: I have rules of thumb and figures of speech, I rarely speak in algorithms. )

    Beyond that, the ‘homicidal maniac’ costume is pretty much I feel seen.

    So wiki says Kratman published Caliphate in 2008, and the snippets and e-ARC would have maybe been before then. So on that order of years my default Halloween costume has been wear what I always wear, or dress up a little nicer, and say that I am going as Pat Buckman.

    Buckman was not nice or sane or good, and was a murderous wackjob who did a lot of evil. On the other hand, sympathetic everyman character. GRipping hand, we’ve been extremely fortunate and have wound up in a place that is extremely far from anywhere where that behavior would be desirable.

    My Halloween party at work was Thursday, I thought about attending as Buckman, and about saying that I was Buckman when I was at the office Friday. I did not.

    That is basically a really passing grade by my standards where appropriate behavior is concerned. My standards are low, but sometimes I meet them very well.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Swift truck: the new JB Hunt of OTR. They have hired many non-engrish shpeeking “drivers.” They are likely doomed as a company, as per the recent crackdown on non-native and utterly nonqualified (more like quali-fried) CDLs.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. It’s not just them. I’ve nearly been run over by a big rig while I was parked in a parking lot.

        He turned in time to miss me, but went through one and a half (fortunately empty) rows of parking spaces before he got straightened out.

        I couldn’t swear that he didn’t speak English, but….

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        1. Yeah. A lot of newbie OTR drivers giving the veteran drivers a bad name. Time was, these rigs were the safest drivers on the road. Aware of surroundings, courteous to other drivers, safe to a fault, and always willing to help out.

          Times have changed since 2020. The Augean stables are in dire need of mucking out.

          Liked by 3 people

  3. Re Wednesday Addams — reminds me of my youngest. Her RBF was legendary (and still is). One silent glower was enough to subdue a group of rowdy boys in her dorm.

    Re “Named character after like, a street sign:” John Sandford did have a character like that in his Lucas Davenport books. His name was Del Capslock!

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  4. Accidental expert?

    Um. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Fine. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

    Must admit being retired. Having natural white, with few gray, hairs, I get overlooked on the might be expert category. Especially when it comes to computers and like devices. Nope, just ignore me. I didn’t write the software that runs it, or runs on it. (Truth. Also Truth, probably could figure it out. But nope, nope, nope.)

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  5. Reading: yup. I can read MUCH faster than I can watch or listen. Playing the ‘media’ at an increased rate just makes it unintelligible (which probably it is at normal speed.)

    Music: yes, used to do that to my daughter – ‘That’s nice, but I prefer the original from 1967 …’

    Owl and owlets: like unto foxes, owl hardware, cat software.

    Sarcasm: and the the inability to resist simplifying it when they don’t get it.

    My Gowron-look is ameliorated by glasses, and if I take those off, can’t see the rotten kid.

    Tossup between 5 and 6 for Xi (which is NOT a pronoun!)

    No booze before 8 am? Try noon in some places. And all of Election Day, when you really need it!

    It’s Saturday after Halloween – in daylight, my neighborhood is still here! Yay!

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    1. The music … When the first Aquaman movie came out, the orchestra students were enthusing about an orchestral version of a song from the movie. It was PitBull’s cover of Toto’s Africa. I remember when that came out. (Yes, children, in the long ago time when MTV still played music.)

      And I remember when The Cure and Clash and all those were still touring and releasing new albums. SIGH.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. Upon hearing that the bars are closed here on Election Day, an Englishman is supposed to have remarked:

      ‘Bloody hell. I couldn’t vote for any of those candidates sober!’

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  6. The Bureaucrat piece can only be removed from the board by its own King, and for every Bureaucrat piece in play there is a 10% chance that another Bureaucrat will be placed on a random square. If there are 10 or more Bureaucrats on the board, one additional Bureaucrat must be placed every turn.

    If the game runs more than about 50 moves, the board will fill up with Bureaucrats and no further moves will be possible. This is called ‘gridlock’. Both sides lose the game.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I no longer have it, but I took calculus in high school from Thomas, 3rd edition, an abridged version. In college, my math-major girlfriend used the full-sized book.

        Didn’t learn a lot of calculus; did finally understand Trig functions from that class, but not in time to save my grade in Trig. Totally botched the SAT AP Math exam, didn’t care, wasn’t going to do math stuff later. Placing into 2nd semester Calc was all passing that exam would do for me.

        Aforementioned girlfriend, later wife, got PhD in Geometry. She explained that book authors write up problems and hand them off to teaching assistants to write the solutions for the back of the book. Which is why the answers we got never matched the answers at the back: TAs used different techniques to solve than we were studying.

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        1. After computers became fast enough, and software like Mathematica was developed, they discovered that some of the Standard Integrals published in generations of calculus books had been wrong all along. Deriving them was such a long tedious process, nobody wanted to go through all that again just to check them.

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  7. Frenz, I propose that technology may be ready for a dress up game shooter, where you put garments on your avatar, and you are supposed to adjust things so that your holster does not print.

    Different holster designs, and positions, of course, and you have to practice drawing, shooting, and holstering for your avatar to respond to your commands consistently.

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    1. Over at Wright State’s neuro, bio, etc. departments that do research to help the Air Force, I once participated in a study that was about looking at pictures, and figuring out from them if something was concealed under clothing. (They were thinking about bombs, mostly. I was paid, and I didn’t have to sign an NDA.)

      I guess I did okay, but I pointed out that a really fashion-conscious girly-girl type would probably score a LOT better on that sort of thing. (The kind of person who does counseling about foundation garment usage.)

      I expect that training to spot shoplifters would also make one better at noticing the odd gun or bomb.

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  8. When I was an undergraduate physics major, one of our professors was doing some classified research for the Navy, something involving hydrogen. In one part of the research he needed the solution of one particularly difficult integral. As luck would have it, it had a solution in one particularly respected table of integrals, over a hundred years old. Just to be sure, he looked up the result in an independent table of integrals, also over a hundred years old. The solutions matched. He used the result in his research, which turned out not to work, because the integral solution was wrong. And the independent table of integrals? Turns out, one table had cribbed from the other. He eventually got the correct solution, but it just goes to show, even before the internet, just because it’s printed in black and white, doesn’t mean it’s right!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo all had portions of their work funded because the Catholic Church realized that the astronomical tables used to calculate feast days had accumulated copyist errors over the centuries, and they wanted new tables based on fresh observations.

      The Church that supposedly ‘hates science’ paid for the research that found out the Earth is not the centre of the solar system.

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      1. The Church that supposedly ‘hates science’ paid for the research that found out the Earth is not the centre of the solar system.

        But that also wasn’t in the grant proposal. Would they have funded it if it had been?

        They deserve credit for not burying the information (along with the astronomers), but openly asking for money to disprove Church doctrine (see also: climate scam belief as a funding filter) would likely have met with a cool reception.

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  9. I can see my late sister-in-law lighting a cigarette off a burner like that, but the beer would have been Jax back in the day, to match the New Orleans ambiance.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. The original quote was:

    “The customer is always right…in matters of taste.”

    somewhere along the way we forgot the second half.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. Swift trucking company:

    Sure

    We’re

    Insured

    For

    That

    -also sometimes-

    Sure

    Wish

    I had a

    Faster

    Truck

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  12. Swift trucking company:

    Sure

    We’re

    Insured

    For

    That

    -also sometimes-

    Sure

    Wish

    I had a

    Faster

    Truck

    Like

  13. There’s the obvious joke about Rudolph Diesel being a German.

    The short version is that such question sounds like an interesting thought exercise to me, but I am probably too boring and unimaginative to do it justice.

    The pulsed propulsion concepts that they are/were working on for aviation look pretty extreme too me. I sorta feel that there might only be so many possible theoretical cycles to approximate, only so many ways to arrange surfaces that make sense. Basically, I am distant enough from the design space that I can wonder if maybe the known designs actually sample the possibility space fairly well.

    Which probably means that I am old and set in may ways, blinkered by experience, and am taking thermodynamics and fluid mechanics far too lightly.

    Obviously if the aliens are space elves, can regenerate fingers, and are all explosive experts who are usually missing fingers, then they might have a very different tolerance for designs that they find acceptable than we would.

    Anyway, oxygen breathing is a relevant and hugely constraining factor.

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