strait's comments

> It's starting to rot at 25 years, lying in the rain and mud and beetles. There are logs much much older than that lying around the local woods. There are stumps over a century old.

Limited to rot resistant trees, such as cedars. Even then, not shielded from the rain for 25 years and not seeing much rot would be amazing.

I often get the blues from scanning the front page of Hacker news. Another day, another legend passing away. How could I forget when there is Always something there to remind me?

When does

    if x and x == nil

ever evaluate to true in LuaJIT? What does the FFI have to do with it? Please explain.

Edit:

I think I see what you mean here. The x variable is actually a CDATA object returned by the LuaJIT FFI. Upon comparison, the NULL pointer value inside would be converted to nil. I don't see this as being a 'footgun' unless you forget that you're dealing with a CDATA object.

Composting a humanure mix in sealed enclosures with a regulated exhaust would produce relatively high nitrogen compost. Deliver this locally to growing crops in a just-in-time manner for less nitrogen loss. However, it's hard to see this happening on any meaningful scale, with regard to the current trajectory of modern civilization, especially in the cities.

Interesting idea, but I suspect that jurisdictions soft on squatters are almost certainly soft on vandalism and theft of contents caused by said occupants. Once the owner reclaims their property, it's then an uphill battle to prove and pursue damages against people who are long gone.

Before an owner takes any action, they had best know what type of squatters they are dealing with. Some would be likely to set fire to the place on the way out (or not leave; perishing amongst the smoke and flames) if they are subjected to enough anguish.

anyone, everyone == usually false

there are exceptions == usually true

Yes, also Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker out of Dallas. Roy Orbison out of West Texas. Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings out of Lubbock. Freddy King and Albert Collins. The amazing Willie Nelson, who may still be on the road, again. Eric Johnson, one of my favs.

Methane production requires nearly a total anoxic environment. Even trace amounts of oxygen are enough for substantial suppression. Decaying roots, even if they were deeper, would be exposed to at least a little oxygen throughout the early decay process (unless continually flooded with water). Once the roots have decayed to a stage where they are more decay resistant, there would naturally be even less local oxygen, but they would also be in a state not favorable for substantial methane production.

The chemistry seems complicated. To create methane, you need hydrogen, which is a byproduct of previous anaerobic microbe activity. Think lots of fresh plant material decomposing in an anaerobic environment.

Another example of an article selectively picking bits and pieces to support a sensational and false conclusion. The discussion of oxygen exposure was conveniently left out. Why focus so much on the concept of recalcitrant carbon when microbes will break down rock and even petrochemicals under the right conditions?

Oxygen is a dominant factor in accelerated decomposition. Carbon is continually sequestered in healthy soils where plant roots will die back periodically, both seasonally and from grazing action. Much of the spent root carbon is sequestered in the soil as the limited local oxygen is used in partial decomposition, replaced with gases that serve to preserve and dilute whatever small amount of oxygen may later infiltrate the soil, depending on depth in soil.

This is the same concept seen when lacto-fermenting vegetables in a jar. Enough salts would effectively halt decomposition, but just a fraction of the salt is needed when the CO2 generated from the lacto bacteria flushes out the oxygen. The rising acid and falling oxygen gradually drive the microbial activity toward zero.

West Texas is still in Texas.

The ultimate solution is just to live with it. The little shards are occasionally sticking up at just the right angle to force a minor puncture. It's about the same as stepping on rose or blackberry thorns or on the thin point of a broken mussel shell on the beach. The pain is not severe, more of a sharp twinge. Sometimes it gets stuck and you have to pull it out. It bleeds somewhat, which is a good thing.

Once the foot soles are thickened from use, it really takes a lot to force a puncture and your reflexes evolve toward letting off pressure from the ground as soon as something sharp is felt. A resulting wound is usually thin and tiny, and seals/heals pretty quickly.

I had a glass puncture wound while running just a few weeks ago, but the one before that was sometime last year. This is on asphalt city walkways/bikeways that are very heavily frequented by the public throughout the week. So, I feel like it's pretty rare, even there. Maybe once every 200 to 300 miles of running on city sidewalks or trails.

In the evenings, usually every day. However starting out, it was more like every second or third day, until the feet became stronger and I had learned gradually to run with more finesse, exact landing, and less peak impact with each stride.

When I go out to run, there's no set goal or any pressure. I have a route in mind, but the idea is to just take it easy and bounce along at whatever speed I feel like going. It's like when I used to cross-country ski just for fun.

Running completely barefoot has changed everything for me. It started several years ago with just intending to walk barefoot across park fields and down short trails. However, I soon had the urge to start running barefoot whenever I could.

This became a lengthy venture of mainly relearning how to run properly, losing extra fat weight, and improving foot strength and reflexes, which seemed to all come without much laborious determination.

Several years later, I'm out running barefoot across all kinds of terrain, except for trails surfaced with sharp gravel, and it feels great! On the rest days, I start out with a few miles in mind, but often end up running twice as far or more, because I just want to keep the fun going.

I realize that most people have trouble relating to this. It's something I would have never really understood until I had gotten rid of my shoes and tried it.

They're not lying. They're just assuming you're using the proper cookware.

I was visiting family in a very rural part of Texas recently. No iron crosses or confederate flags, but plenty of Trump/Pence flags and signs still around. It's probably the best place to be unvaccinated actually. People out there are accustomed to keeping a respectful distance, aside from the occasional brief hug or handshake. They will not tolerate crowded conditions as in the city, because they don't have to. Even the Sunday church congregations are sparser than in days past. Consequently, the Covid threat out there has remained quite low.

More likely the number 10000 is now entrenched in so many varied locations in the last 50 years that it would be a monumental undertaking to try and adjust it successfully.

Area Man Finds Study Finding Him Full of Crap, Full of Crap

It seems like there are nine different ways to enter INSERT mode and they are all useful enough to be used with some frequency.

So, having the pedal simply substitute for ESCAPE would be sufficient and should be able to improve flow after some practice.

During the period of about 10 years that I was using Emacs as my main editor, I invested countless hours in mastering Elisp, configuring this and that, writing custom functions, fixing abandoned minor modes that I still found useful... It was literally all over the place.

At some point, the list of things that were broken/didn't work well for me got quite long, and I became dissatisfied enough to stop what I was doing and start going through various elisp packages, trying to understand what was really happening.

Let me say first, that I really admire and respect the potential of Lisp. When the code is well written, it is elegant, reasonably comprehensible, and malleable. However, when the code gets sloppy or unnecessary levels of abstraction are added to 'just make things work', it quickly becomes inscrutable. I kept running into package after package of this kind of poorly written, inscrutable Elisp. One package was using EIEIO (object-oriented Elisp) and there were excess levels of indirection all over the place, across thousands of lines of code.

Org-tables are pretty neat, but ultimately a fancy gimmick. I had a 7 column table, and after 200 rows, the reformatting became ridiculously slow. After looking through the tens of thousands of lines of org-mode Elisp code, my main question was, "Is all this code really necessary?" I know that org-mode does a lot, but Elisp is a dynamically typed scripting-level language. With macros. What went wrong?

Primary school in rural Texas. We'd spend an hour a day singing songs mostly about how much God blesses Texas, America, and the Marine Corps, then finish off with The Eyes of Texas song.

In our version, The Eyes ended up in the kitchen watching Dinah. She was about to blow her horn, thus ending the mandate of The Eyes. We would plead for her not to do such a thing, for her sake, for our sake, for goodness sake! The Eyes would know.