9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Latin in the Voynich Manuscript
9nGQluzmnq3M's comments
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors
Is there a solid source on what was actually collected?
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors
Correction: Keyhole became Google Earth. (Fun fact: the K in KML is Keyhole.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History
Google Maps stems from an Australian company called Where2, which AFAIK was not funded by spooks.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The Intricate Translation Process for a Murakami Novel
Of all Murakami's books, the one that made the biggest impression on me was "Underground", his non-fiction book consisting entirely of interviews with survivors of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks in Tokyo. It's simultaneously fascinating and absolutely horrifying, and it goes into a lot of depth on the lives of the people both before and after the attack.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: I'm a Coffin Confessor
They can be trademarked, which is why you can't use "Harry Potter" without permission.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The 'brushing' scam that's behind mystery parcels
I've gotten those too. The letters/emails are carefully worded so the subject screams "Pending domain registration!" to make you think it's your actual domain expiring, but the small print says that the service they offer is "registering" your domain in some random "world business directory". This way it's not an outright scam, in that they do render a (completely useless) service in exchange for your money, but of course they hope that the random admin/manager who sees the "bill" won't realize the difference and will pay up.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Gravitricity – Fast, long-life energy storage
Tungsten costs around $30k/ton, so you'd be looking at a cool $15M for that 500T cube.
Lead goes for around $2k/ton, so this might be a more feasible compromise.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Gravitricity – Fast, long-life energy storage
This proposal would likely be a lot more economic if they could reuse existing holes, like abandoned mines. However, mines tend not to dig down vertically and the cost of retrofitting and maintenance would be non-trivial.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Tech firms face growing resentment of parent employees during Covid-19
I've worked for several companies that offered paid time off for volunteering. (With plenty of conditions and limits, of course.)
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Companies that help people vanish
Midlife crisis is a thing in itself. One day you realize 20 years have passed, your spouse is no longer the person you married, you don't like your kids, you hate your job and -- here's the crisis part -- it dawns on you that this is it and you'll follow your current trajectory of quiet unhappiness for the rest of your life.
In reaction some people buy a Harley, some seek escape in adultery, some commit suicide... and a few disappear and start a new life.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Companies that help people vanish
In Japan you need guarantors even for mundane things like renting an apartment. This is particularly difficult for immigrants if they don't know anybody and their employer won't sponsor them.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The older you are, the quicker you count out a minute
The key insight (that older people count out seconds faster) is based on experimental science. The rest is more speculation.
FWIW, I'm convinced that seconds felt slower when I was a child, and they now tick up faster than they used to. Obviously there's no way to measure this, because this is my perception, not measurable reality.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean
The modern Korean writing system (hangul) is unrelated to Chinese.
Also, it's quite common for languages to be written in scripts originally developed for completely unrelated languages. Maltese is related to Arabic but written in the Latin (English) alphabet, Mongolian uses Cyrillic (Russian), Thai/Lao/Khmer derive from South Indian scripts, etc.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Bardcore
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: How Do You Decode a Hapax? Also, What’s a Hapax? (2017)
As always, Chinese takes this to the next level, since there are historical characters for which both meaning and pronunciation have been lost.
A famous one is 篪, used exactly once in the Classic of Poetry (1000 BC), whose meaning was unknown until another text surfaced describing it as a type of flute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon#Chinese_and_Ja...
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The “menu engineers” who optimize restaurant revenue
Good = tasty! As a random example, Yang's Dumpling http://www.xysjg.com/ sells exactly one thing, shengjianbao dumplings, and all their outlets have lines out the door. Even the holes in the wall with 20+ items tend to focus on a well-defined theme, eg. you might have hand-cut noodles with a variety of toppings but little beyond that.
And yes, higher-end restaurants do tend to have longer menus, because in China these cater mostly to large groups and entertaining businessmen, and a key part of Chinese banquets is to order way too much food -- so much so that there's now an official CCP campaign to stamp out the practice.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/china-food-waste-o...
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The “menu engineers” who optimize restaurant revenue
I presume you're talking about America, since I can assure you that in Asia QR codes are alive and well. In China in particular everything is done with QR.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: The “menu engineers” who optimize restaurant revenue
I'd beg to differ. Really good Chinese restaurants in China tend to specialize ruthlessly, selling only a few items.
If anything, the "matrix menu" where you have X proteins in Y sauces for X*Y stir-fry combos is usually a "restaurant smell" indicating that they don't really care about the end product (satay salmon, anyone?).
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Shippos USPS Time in Transit Data
Tampering with ballots will still be illegal, even if the company is private.
That's also a bit of weird argument, since we're right now seeing how the USPS can easily be bent by political pressure precisely because it is a govt institution and presidents already get to appoint their cronies to run it.
9nGQluzmnq3M | 5 years ago | on: Shippos USPS Time in Transit Data
But should the USPS be a public institution? Many countries have opted to privatize their postal services, admittedly with varying results, but with quite a few successes as well: you may have heard the package division of what was once Deutsche Bundespost, now known worldwide as DHL.
I do agree that right now is not a great time for radical changes though!
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