Nuke

most of my instructors were good though. for example i went into psyche 101 with no interest what so ever, but the instructor made the subject very interesting. but i do agree many of the students were brain dead. i had to help many other students who were falling behind, which took time out of my studies, and i also had a job building computers as part of a paid internship and between 8 hours of that and the 3+ hours a day of commuting i was tired before i even got to class. i was living on 6 hours of sleep and doing my studying on the bus. pol-sci was something else entirely, combine student disinterest with nebulous subject matter and boring teacher, its not a forgone conclusion where that's going. that was in 2002, i can only imagine it being a hundred times worse now because reasons that would break forum rules discussing. still i think my worst teachers were in elementary school. some of them no doubt caused me some severe developmental issues and it didn't help much that mom couldn't settle down anywhere. i had like five different 4th grade teachers. and what my second grade teacher did was inexcusable, and would have got her fired these days.

i really think it depends on the theater. if its a small town theater, like the little one screen one movie a week theater, which is run by the high school to fund its sports and stem programs, its a lot better. you always know the people running it and most of the people there, and it helps the school. urban megaplex theaters on the other hand are a loud annoying mess. it smells like 5 kinds of fast food all mixed together so it smells like a mall food court. there are premium seating areas right where one would normally just show up early to get in any other theater. everyone is loud and even though the sound system is cranked to 11 you can still hear them. then the previews go on for 30 minutes. thats no way to watch a movie.

wow you made me interested in playing kerbal again. will play with this later. gotta get the old ion horse out of the hanger. now i need to come up with a biker themed space suit.

ive heared a lot of horror stories about movie popcorn. you could be buying popcorn that was popped 2 or 3 days ago and they seldom clean the popcorn machine.

i was never a fan of movie popcorn and i still agree with op. not one movie came out this year that even remotely interested me. but dune 2020 is comming and so far it looks like its gon be gud.

i think dune (and also star wars) hit the nail on the head. if you are going ftl it is impossible to observe whats in front of you before you hit it. the starwars solution was to compute everything such that it had a perfect model of the course on file. in dune, they just took large quantities of spice so they could see a few fractions of a second into the future. star trek just puts a warp drive on everything (sensors, communications, computers).

how the hell can you mention both freelancer and starlancer but not freespace? that was like the golden age of space sims there. at least you didnt mention tacky on the fringe. and last i checked its still being modded/developed. i permanently borrowed a ti99 from my school (they were going to throw it out anyway), and that was the only piece of software it came with.

i live on a small island in southeast alaska, population < 3k, but everything is in walking distance. i have lived in big cities before, but i dont really like it.

cant say ive ever seen the show, so i can say i neither like nor dislike it. i dont really watch much tv anymore, too much ersatz intellectualism and too many regressive progressives. at some point in the future i might check it out, but its pretty damn low on the list of shows i want to check out. we actually had a couple huge rick and morty fans as neighbors a few years ago, they too thought they were smarter than everyone else. always yelling at each other and sleeping while their kids ran amok (one of them is a natural leader but they will probably stomp that out of her before she turns 18, given their apparent lack of parenting skills). but the cops visited them a lot, lots of drug related stuff and eventually got evicted for same. they also couldn't park their cars correctly, none of them, not even the parents, always parking 30+ degrees off the lines. its a small parking lot, save some space for everyone else. its nothing to do with the show mind you, but thats the impression i get from rick and morty fans. seems like a case of 'like what i like or your stupid'. but you do bring up another thing i dont like. people who dislike anyone who they deem stupid. or who assume someone else's intelligence and ostracize them if its not up to their standards. everyone wants to think that they are in the half of the population above average intelligence, but only half of them actually are. sometimes i wonder how many online iq tests they took before they found the one that gave them a score over 100, and confirmation bias does the rest. everyone has occasional bouts with stupidity and moments of extreme enlightenment. take tesla and einstein for example, world reguards them as geniuses but even they had an occasional derpness about them. like how tesla didn't believe in electrons, or einstein couldn't accept quantum mechanics. now take someone like al capone, who had the mental age of a 3 year old, yet he managed to evade the police for years and they were only able to lock him up on tax evasion, never mind all the murder and extortion. vincent van gogh was extremely mentally ill but still made masterpeices. stop being a bunch of iqists, human intelligence (or lack there of) is more complex than a single number score (and if you need a one dimensional score to make a judgement you have already demonstrated your lack of capacity for understanding a complex systems).

im almost 40 and i still have never had a drivers license if thats any consolation.

new words are also different. they are ok, for the most part. its the misuse and mangling of existing words i dont like. as for texting, you essentially have a format that forces you to compress your speaking down into half words, acronyms and emojis. its not much of a stretch of the imagination to see how that might affect one's use of language. also relevant:

yes but evolution of language should be slow. and furthermore with globalization it makes sense for it to evolve even slower for the sake of consistency. its natural for every generation to develop its own slang, that's fine. most of what i use is more gen-x slang (most of which is derived from the 50s and 60s due to surfer and hippie culture, and of course rock'n'roll) than yz speak, despite being born in '81. not even sure what generation i fall into because the starting threshold for millennials is either 80 or 82 depending on who's definition you use. i heard someone my age use the term 'sandwich generation', not sure, i just no i have absolutely nothing in common with millennials. i remember '80s speak being rather atrocious. i dont remember '90s speak at all. but most of the slang still adhered to grammar rules. the shift key is strictly an angry button. that too, i blame texting and twitter for this. i miss irc where you are were allowed to type full sentences, and that was in the 90s. sometimes i feel like we have regressed technologically. i also notice a lot of people who use smartphones never seem to use the phone part anymore, so its only a matter of time before people start speaking emoji. these devices really need another name, as even the "smart" is wrong. these devices only execute code, they don't actually think (at least till we start seeing neural net processors, and that might become a thing soon). with a lot of things moving to the cloud, the expance's "hand terminal" is a better name, and if you read 'the churn' apparently they also have cyberdecks (which is also becoming a thing because of 3d printers, raspberry pis and an odd merging of the case mod and mechanical keyboard community).

people using words wrong. such as using a noun as if it was a verb or any other word type substitute. also related to the slightly less annoying error of using the wrong tense for the situation. i am far less concerned for things like proper punctuation and capitalization like your usual grammar police, where as those are often common mistakes, where as the behavior ive mentioned is almost always intentional out of vanity or blatant unbridled narcissism, where sounding cool is more important than making sense.

i saw the joke which is why i clarified. i believe this is all covered in maxwell's equations.

i really wished my high school had a pool as i would have just done swim class. this was up in anchorage alaska, and if you've never visited has one of the best bike/ski trail networks i ever seen. our gym ta had the bright idea of buying a bunch of bikes at a police auction, they were in various states of repair and for a week gym was bicycle maintenance class (this actually helped me out later on in life when i was doing bike assembly for retail stores). so we had for the last month of the year we did nothing but ride bikes all over town (the cycling unit turned out really effective and is also how i learned to ride a bike). we also did cross country skiing in the winter and that was a lot less fun, and cold, and exhausting. weight lifting was probably the best though, go in, do your circuit and that was pretty much it. its non competitive so not a whole lot of banter from the other students, and the gym teacher didn't need to yell so much (she yelled a lot, but that kind of comes with the job) so it was a nice and peaceful change of pace.

lol, proof that bureaucrats are evil.

my latest magnetic project was building hall encoders and rotation sensors, it was quasi-successful. the encoders were most successful mostly because they are just a binary output indicating when the magnetic field intersecting the sensor changes polarity. it mostly just requires putting a bunch of tiny magnets into a 3d printed rotor with alternating polarity. one sensor isnt enough to detect direction of motion, but a second one 90 degrees out of phase lets you figure that out. so my print included a stator where i could insert my sensors at the right angles. of course at the end of the day i think you can get more resolution out of optical encoders simply because its easier to make a tiny slit in a plastic disc than it is to make a tiny neodymium magnet with enough field for the sensor to pick up on. i was using some 2x2x3mm magnets, which are already too small to work with, and i think i only got like 32 ticks/rotation which managed to fit in a 1 inch knob (though a bigger knob for more magnets could increase that a lot). for this i used a us1881 hall latch, in that they only detect a change in polarity and not the field strength. the rotation sensors were intended to culminate in a drop in replacement for your standard panel mount potentiometer. i based my initial design on a really old skool style potentiometer (they are so old they were made in america). now i hate to destroy a fine example of mil spec american pots that are still fairly good dispite being maybe 50 years old, but i needed the bearings and shaft to make my own sensor (anyone wishing me not to destroy this junk historical artifact in the future, pls donate one micro lathe). these are a different style than the ones i want to replace, but it was a good place to start. i printed a housing and press fit the berings into them. the shaft accepta a 3d printed armature at one end with the other side being the input. the armature is just 2 magnets each on their own prong of a 3d printed fork that rotates around the hall sensor, in north-south north south-order. the sensor itself, a ss49e linear hall sensor sits on a small pcb with support components that screws into the back of the housing. i made 4 of these so far. the first 2 were so successful and i used them in a joystick related project. recently i decided that i needed another set, but since the first set was based around a pair of magnets from my parts bin which seem to be the perfect size and shape for this application. try as i might i couldn't find any magnets of similar dimensions for sale on the internet. i tried using the magnets i bought for the encoders, but they seemed to be too weak for reliable detection in this application. so i went through my parts bin and found some larger mystery magnets. i had to design a new armature and it barely fit in the housing design i had used. only seemed to go together after a lot of filing and sanding. it kind of works but is somewhat non linear, and thats likely something to do with the largeness of the magnets. i figure its a goldilocks problem, finding the right size magnets to produce the right field strength at the right distance. but there is a simple way around that. create a table of sensor value vs known angles. then if you have a value straight off the adc, you find the 2 entries in the table that bracket it, and then you can use interpolation to determine the approximate angle. i still need to come up with a jig to test the linearity so i can generate the luts. likely put a stepper motor on the same shaft, sweep the range one step at a time (which is a known quantity determined by the motor's step size), while logging the sensor reading straight from the adc and and current angle the stepper is holding. of course now we are bumping into the limits of the arduino. you can only store so much table in the microcontrollers eeprom or program memory (which are tiny, precious and in demand). 2 bytes is enough for a 16 bit output. since the measurements are taken at a regular interval i can use the array index for this. easy way is one entry per degree, anything else would require a conversion factor somewhere, and store 180 degrees worth of readings, which is 360 bytes and too big for the eeprom. if you are using the stock 10 bit adc you might be able to bit pack and save 6 bits per entry (225 bytes for the whole sweep). another way is to use fewer samples and accept any resulting local nonlinearity. say make the ticks 2 degrees per index and you only need half as many samples. i would need to do both or use a bigger micro. things are complicated if you have multiple sensors that produce different values when you characterize them. there are some newer angle sensors (like the hal 835) with the adc, lut table and interpolation hardware (hell its an entire dsp) built in and they usually have pwm or some other digital output. while its nice to have options where i dont have to change my physical design to accomidate the sensor, the catch is you have to program each sensor and to make matters worse, each sensor has only 3 pins, so you program it by modulating the power pin. this is the most complicated 3 pin part ive ever seen which makes integration difficult. now if i could find one that can run at 3.3v i can use it as my raspberry pi joystick sensor of choice (theres always a gotcha in part selection). this is true, lots of kids have been injured by eating the things. both that the metals might be toxic and they have been know to go through your intestine wall when you swallow more than one. peritonitis is not fun. also gauss rifle (unrelated to the rest of the post)

my whole college experience felt like kindergarden. instructors would read to us and most of the tests were multiple choice. i did have to write a few papers, but they werent that many and they werent that good either. most of the time i found that so long as i actually read the textbooks i could ace the tests. this inevitably led to my distrust of educational institutions, its all one big scam. they didnt do anything for me that i couldnt have done on my own. ended up with a huge pile of debt and a degree that wasnt worth the paper it was printed on. im not a big fan of spectator sports. its kind of like people watching me play video games (oddly this is popular now). the only reason i can see to watch sports (and the same goes for esports too) is if you want to improve your game (any other reasons for watching sports pretty much boils down to herd mentality). but in gym class i mostly excelled at racquet sports, weightlifting, and baseball. i also bowled a lot but that was not really school related. my advice to surviving gym class is to find a sport you are actually good at and just do that, sure beats doing random stuff from week to week. i went to a small school and we just had the one pe class, so i didnt have any options as far as sports go.

im still partial to the meatball. i don't need no worms.

so they can just fly, they cant stop bullets or anything like that. i think id get a couple shotguns just in case.

anything north of 20 minutes is too long. mostly because i can only watch so many videos in a day and there are other channels. ted uses an 18 minute time limit for its talks, mostly because that is the limits of the human attention span, but it sure sounds like optimal video length to me.

ive been watching project binky if that counts. that mini gon be fast. frankly i watch it for the british humor though.

every now and again, but i tend to think a lot of his videos are too long.

you can use a lazy susan as your main turret. those can hold quite a bit of load (especially the big ones you see in furniture). then find you an old bicycle rim that you can use as a belt drive and a small gear motor. for elevation make a jack screw out of some threaded rod perhaps. of course you probably want accurate feedback on both axes. an accelerometer might be able to give you good indication of azimuth, and a digital compass can give you your heading. then point it at a known radio source to calibrate away any error.

i usually go with lua for parsing data. it has some awesome pattern matching capabilities. you can parse an entire line in one line of code where if you did the same in c or c++ you might have a dozen lines. but if you are using an arduino or something and sending data to a computer over serial, what you can do is just have your print commands put in all the formatting for whatever text format you were going to use and you dont have to bother with any intermediate parsing code. just cut and paste from the terminal.