Lorindól

This young woman is an exceptional writer. Not many her age can achieve such coherency and well laid structure in longer essays.

I hope she will continue using her skills and keep fighting against this new rise of misogyny.

We’re about the same age. If I had a penny every time I discovered that something we were taught as the truth was later discovered to be completely wrong, I’d have a LOT of pennies.

Do you have a source for this claim? I remember reading an article where a mosquito researcher claimed that eradicating mosquitoes would have basically zero effect on any ecosystem. While they provide an additional food source for several species, no other species is dependent on them. If they would disappear, their predators would just eat something else.

One could argue that if the mosquitoe’s predators switched their cuisine, it could have an effect on other insect species. But the reseacher was adamant that this would be neglicible, since in many regions mosquitoes don’t even hatch until mid-June and the birds do just fine without them.

A clipshow episode. These were used as cheap fillers when the shows still had 20+ episode seasons, if the production needed to save money this was the easiest way to do it.

My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.

Around the time when HDMI was released my friend bought some "super-high-end "cable that cost over 200$, since he wanted the "best possible performance " out of his system. I tried to explain that the cheapest cables would give the exact same results if they’re not faulty from the start. We had a loud argument about this, even though the guy is a goddamn tech PhD. He just could not admit he got scammed and tried to give me a lecture about “how the gold plated connectors make all the difference”.

You are correct.

This anecdote is empirical, I know, but from my own experience I know how very hard if not impossible it can be to tell the difference between 320kbps and FLAC tracks, even with a high quality setup.

I happened to find excellent vintage studio monitors some time ago and with my music afficionado friend we wanted to try if we could tell the difference. We are no audiophiles, but we both can tell the difference between good and bad sound.

Both selected three favourite tracks from different genres and we converted the CD-ripped FLACs to 320kbps CBR and put them on a random playlist with the originals. Then we listened.

Both got a few right, but I couldn’t really say what it was that made guess the FLAC. It was more like a feeling in the back of your head than anything substantial. “This sounds somehow more alive” is maybe the best description I can give. Or it was just dumb luck.

Anyway we came to the conclusion that 320kbps can be enough to replicate an enjoyable sound, at least for us. Not one track sounded lacking and we had a good time with our little experiment.

EDIT: Fixed typos.

I will do anything in my power to protect my children from online ads. At home it’s very simple with your basic adblockers and Pihole.

In the 5th grade my daughter got a laptop from school, it was a quite decent Thinkpad. She brought it home to do some presentation and went to her room. After few minutes she brought the laptop to me and said: “Dad, I think there’s a virus or something like that in my computer.”

The only web browser installed was Edge, without any kind of ad blockers. My kid had assumed that the hideous intrusive ads were some form of malware attack. I installed Firefox on her laptop with all the proper tweaks and disabled Edge as best as I could. All the Windows ad and telemetry options were also on, I disabled everything that was possible. I also showed how different themes can be installed, we ended up with a classic Nyan Cat ;)

When she took the laptop back to school I told her that Edge is not to be used. Firefox can handle everything and if the teacher has some issue with this, I am happy to come and explain this in person.

Now my daughter’s laptop is apparently the only ad free machine in her class and the other kids have openly expressed their envy. Why the school IT-department had not installed adblockers and had left the Windows telemetry on is simply baffling. No one should have to watch ads, but kids in school should be especially protected from this crap.

This. I’ve been using a 2 Gen 8GB iPod Nano since 2008. They’re not hard to find and installing a new battery is not that hard, if you have any experience at soldering.

I also have a Sansa Clip+, it has a far better DAC than iPods and can take a 32GB SD card. Runs Rockbox without any problems.

There’s one for Firefox, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microslop/

I felt the same. The actual detention got postponed for several weeks, since she had more important duties to attend to. When it finally happened, we played chess together and talked about movies.

She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, but since she passed away over 25 years ago I don’t feel binded by it anymore ;)

In the sixth grade I got my first detention ever because I picked up my baseball cap.

We were on a field trip and we went to visit some museum in the capital by train. While we walked back to the train station, our teacher stated that “no one is to step out of the train before her permission or they will get detention”. I was the last to get on the train and my cap hit the backpack of the classmate in front of me and fell out of the train doors. I instinctively turned around, leaned out whist holding onto a safety bar and picked my cap. And stepped back on board.

I was a calm kid and had never broken any school rules or gotten into any trouble whatsoever. So when my classmates saw me putting one feet outside the train they simply flipped: “TEACHER, LORINDÓL STEPPED OUT OF THE TRAIN! YOU’RE GETTING A DETENTION!”

I was utterly dumbfounded. My “friends” had betrayed me and the teacher was approaching and looking angry. With tears in my eyes I explained what had happened and reminded her that we still had more than 10 minutes until the train doors would even close. Her face went from angry to sad and she silenced my heckling classmates with a few strict words. She told me that we would discuss this when we were back at school.

When we got back, everyone else got to go home and the teacher asked me to our classroom with her. “Lorindól, I’m very sorry. I have to give you detention because you did step out of the train, even if it was for all the right reasons. I understand you acted instinctively and did not mean to break any rules. But I must keep my word or it will lose it’s meaning. As stupid as this sounds, the purpose of this detention is not to punish you. It’s purpose is to show the others that my word is the law in this classroom, with no exceptions. I hope you can understand why I must do this.” I thought about it for a while and said that I did.

When I told my parents about the detention my dad couldn’t stop laughing. “You finally get a detention and it’s for NOTHING!”

Mom was so angry that she wanted to call the teacher and make her call the detention off. I managed to talk her out of it and didn’t hold any grudge against the teacher. I learned a lot about the world of adults that day.

Lasr summer I asked ChatGPT about Liberty Caps - just to see how bad advice it would give me. It showed me pictures of Death Capsand Destroying Angels and claimed they were Liberty Caps.

After that I was certain that someone was going to die just like that poor guy.

I remember reading that ammonium chloride / “sal ammoniac” / salmiakki was probably first discovered by ancient egyptians. They found natural deposits of it condensed in a ceiling of a cave or something similar. And naturally someone just had to taste it.

Primer is excellent low-budget hard scifi. Few years ago I read Shane Carruth’s script for his scrapped project “A Topiary”. It is wild, no wonder he couldn’t get the funding for it.

Jupiter Ascending is a remarkable achievement.

I’m a bit of a film freak and I have seen quite a few. The only things I remember of Jupiter Ascending are that Mila Kunis and Sean Bean were starring in it and that bee DNA was somehow involved with the latter. I think there were also lots of chases?

No. I shall thank you now.

How can one learn such power?

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/good-omens-season-3-michael-sheen-teases-finale-newsupdate/

Yes and no. The third season plan was scrapped and reduced to one final episode to wrap the story up. We’ll see how it goes.