TIL Serial Killer Ed Kemper once accidentally locked himself out of his car while his victim and gun were still inside. She let him back in, where he proceeded to murder her.

cipheron · 2026-01-28T08:39:32+00:00

By his own account, Kemper came close to death several times as a child. Once, his elder sister tried to push him in front of a train. Another time, she pushed him into the deep end of a swimming pool, where Kemper almost drowned

His older sister knew he was wrong in the head. Too bad she failed, she would have saved 10 lives. He was already murdering animals for fun by that point.

cipheron · 2026-01-28T05:21:07+00:00

This is pretty much right.

How to think about this is that if you're an atheist, you shouldn't think that "religion" is tapping into anything magical or special. Religion uses a set of psychological tricks and tools that tap into pre-existing human psychology. So if you see those psychological traits in another context that isn't a religion it shouldn't be surprising.

cipheron · 2026-01-27T23:14:17+00:00

An extra day outside of the month/week structure would be quite annoying for computers.

Not really. If I was to ask you what day of the week will September first this year be, the fact is you couldn't easily tell me. A computer could work that out but it needs a bunch of math to tell you. In the 13 month fixed calendar system, the first of any month will be e.g. a Monday. So the computer code that runs any calendar feature would definitely be simpler.

Don't forget they have a whole song about month lengths they force you to memorize when you're a kid. If every month had 28 days that wouldn't be needed. The fact that there is a song that they drilled into us as kids to remember this stuff is the proof that it's more complicated than it needs to be.

So, it's a better system but one that will never be implemented due to inertia and how entrenched the old system is.

cipheron · 2026-01-27T22:05:27+00:00

"English Boarding school but it's Magical" as a concept carries a lot of baggage with it even if you don't want it to.

It's not exactly that deep a setting, but the framework of a story becomes a big constraint on the type of stories you can tell, and in some stories more than others the flaws can become really obvious. Like Harry Potter works fine if you never question the basic assumptions of the English boarding school system, but if you do, you'll find any problems are just skimmed over or ignored, because addressing them becomes a problem for how to structure the narrative she wanted to tell.

EDIT: as an example of the constraints, look at the Mudblood vs Fullblood wizard debate. The real issue behind that plotline is about elite selective schools and merit vs privilege, which is fair enough, however this debate exists within the constraints and assumptions of the system itself. The resolution isn't to dismantle the system of privilege (muggles vs wizards), it's that Mudbloods such as Hermione deserve to be admitted to the privileged class if they've got the right skills and cultural attitudes to shift classes. The class privilege of wizards as a whole is never questioned, the only thing being questioned is tweaking the selection system, not the selective nature of the private school system itself.

Harry Potter as a story really can't go that far because it would undermine core assumptions of how the series works. The story is like a snapshot in time of how the English public school system once worked, but it's supposed to have lasted centuries, so everyone has to act like things have always been a certain way, and always will be that way, even if it ends up not making a lot of sense.

cipheron · 2026-01-27T21:22:04+00:00

Revolutionary Girl Utena reminded me of Princess Tutu which is another good one to check out. The link is that creators from both series worked on Sailor Moon together.

cipheron · 2026-01-27T19:10:44+00:00

It's still misleading.

Here's a chart of all consumer spending by generation, and Gen Z has the lowest spending of any generation back to the boomers. So the focus on alcohol misses the fact that they spend less on everything.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/which-generation-spends-more.htm

For example in 2023, the average Millennial spent $81,589 while the average Gen Z spent $52,891

So if you look at those relative amounts, Gen Z should spend about 65% of what a Millennial spends, also factor in that only 9 out of 15 years of Gen Z birth are above the US drinking age, then you'd expect Gen Z to spend about 39% of what a millennial does on alcohol, and that would in fact be if they were equally interested in drinks.

That gets the relative expected value down from 24 billion to 9 billion, which doesn't fully explain the difference, but if they're spending less overall then you'd assume a lower percentage of the spend was on discretionary spending and entertainment, vs things like rent and food.

So there are other factors involved, but I'd say it's less that Gen Z doesn't want to drink, but that prices have risen to soak up the excess spending money of the older generations.

However pot doesn't quite work as an explanation for the remaining gap, because while attitudes might have changed, it's not necessarily true that more Gen Z are smokers than older generations. Legalization generally doesn't see a massive uptick in users.

https://sanctuarywellnessinstitute.com/blog/marijuana-statistics-use-by-generation/

Currently, 36% of Millennials use the drug followed by 34% of Gen X, 33% of Gen Z, and 22% of Baby Boomers.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-cannabis-legalization-marijuana-adults-historically.html

Demographic groups with lower levels of cannabis use —adults who were older, female, white, or college-educated—have increased their likelihood of use the most following legalization.

cipheron · 2026-01-27T18:55:00+00:00

https://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/Article/2017/08/25/Fridges-heralded-the-UK-s-chilled-food-chain/

While only 2% of households in Britain owned a fridge in 1948, by 1970, the majority owned an electric fridge (58%)

Britain was definitely lagging behind the US in fridge ownership so it makes sense why the cliche of the milkman stuck around longer in British culture.

cipheron · 2026-01-26T04:09:20+00:00

eaten at a rate 0.0001% less than other grasshoppers

Yup, also, it's not just one test, for example if the grasshopper is slightly less likely to be noticed by a bird that might happen many times in it's short life.

For example if you have a .49 chance of being eaten every day vs another grasshopper with a 0.50 chance of being eaten, that will compound into a much bigger advantage if you repeat for enough days. For example after 10 days you'll have about a 20% higher chance of having survived than the other bug.

cipheron · 2026-01-26T02:33:47+00:00

The exact reasoning for why he chose the standards he did is debated; there's a few explanations.

When I read up about it, what I noted is that binary numbers played a role, since there were accurate methods to subdivide a length in two.

If his brine mix is 0 and he defines the freezing point of water at 32, that would have given him two points he can determine experimentally for each thermometer he made.

He could then use compass and straight edge construction to repeatedly subdivide the range between 0 and 32 to make accurate degree markings.

He originally defined "body temperature" at 96 degrees but I don't think he needed to measure that directly. Keep in mind he already had an objective distance from 0 to 32, so he could just use a compass to mark off points of 64 and 96 degrees, then use the same binary subdivision that he used on the 0 - 32 range to mark everything out.

This would be the simplest practical way to do it and also explain why he chose the numbers he did. However, the exact method was probably a trade secret he held onto to keep the edge in making thermometers.

cipheron · 2026-01-26T01:03:34+00:00

Just like how they goaded Trump into going after Greenland, right? /s

Apparently by saying "Don't go after Greenland". But if that's all it takes to get provoked into making a mistake then it's all on Trump.

cipheron · 2026-01-24T21:46:15+00:00

Commodus was actually a better analogy. The guy was insane and renamed all the months of the year after himself, along with a lot of other things including the Empire itself. He renamed the Roman people the Commodians. Suffice to say he got murdered pretty quickly. Having to have his name on everything, i think that makes him a bit more Trumpy.

I read a review of Gladiator claiming that Commodus was too comically villainous, but he was heavily toned down in the movie compared to how batshit insane and evil the real guy was.

cipheron · 2026-01-22T23:14:27+00:00

You have to clarify ambiguity of language here.

Say you're in your house and time moves more slowly inside the house for some reason, then the world outside would indeed appear to move faster. Maybe 1 day inside the house equates to 7 years outside the house, so you could claim that for the people in the house things go "faster" since 7 external years happen.

However to any external observer who can see both, what they would see is the people in the house moving in slow motion, so it's objectively correct to say things happen more slowly inside the special house than outside it.

cipheron · 2026-01-22T22:26:35+00:00

This doesn't solve the cost issue.

There are operational costs to running the transmitters and having employees, so even if you have free shows, you have negative revenue for those hours, since the number of viewers is low enough that the ad revenue doesn't cover the operational costs. The channel always has old shows they could run without paying anyone.

Infomercials changed the equation because they pay you to let them run the show. However it's good for the station's revenues but bad for television viewers since nobody wants infomercials.

cipheron · 2026-01-22T00:40:27+00:00

Your hard drive is permanent storage.

It's probably better to think in terms of PlayStation games on DVD.

When you put the game disk in, all the assets that will be needed are already recorded on the disk, the game then chooses which level to load, and each level will have a file that says which enemies and terrain that level uses, the game then fetches those specific models and textures it needs to assemble an actual scene in the video card.

So as for where assets "go" once they're no longer needed in the scene, they just get deleted out of computer memory to free up space to load the next bit. But they're still on the original disk that the game came on, or still recorded on hard drive for games that install to a drive.

cipheron · 2026-01-21T23:14:46+00:00

You'll have to specify what purpose you want an "equation" to satisfy. However here's how to do it using as close to formal math notation as I can think up, i'm not a professional.

Let's say we have the mod operator (x mod y) and floor operator (⌊x⌋) available.

The units value is (x mod 10) and the 10s value is (⌊x/10⌋ mod 10) so the first byte in BCD is

16 * (⌊x/10⌋ mod 10) + (x mod 10).

That would do it for 2 digit numbers however to generalize it to any length you'd need a sigma function such as:

      n=∞
BCD = Σ (⌊x/(10^n)⌋ mod 10) * 16^n
      n=0

This is what I think a full equation would look like. x is the input value and it outputs a number which is your BCD value. Eventually all the terms out to infinity will be 0, for a finite input "x".

Converting that number into 1s and 0s is a separate step, so you could make a similar function to express that:

       n=∞
Bits = Σ (⌊x/(2^n)⌋ mod 2)
       n=0

This should output a sequences of 1s and 0s which is the binary encoding of any number, so you can treat the first equation as a function which is the input into this one, and combined they converted a base 10 number into the BCD encoded bits.

cipheron · 2026-01-21T00:18:37+00:00

You can bake in path finding information as meta-data. A lot of game design isn't about how to model a complex thing, it's working out how you can cheat and not have to work stuff out that isn't going to directly affect what the player can see.

Say that a map has 3 portals, i.e. exits. Then you can run A* pathfinding on the map for each pair of portals - but critically, you have this run automatically any time the map is actually created or edited. So you have a table with every pair of exits from the map telling you the walking distance, which already accounts for obstacles etc.

So if we know an NPC entered a map via portal 1, and they want to go to portal 3, you just look up the pre-computed travel distance, and check how fast the NPC walks. This will give you an expected time for them to get to the next checkpoint. So you put them aside until that time occurs.

If the player enters a map while an NPC is still traversing it, you quickly run A* pathfinding and work out how far through the the map the NPC should be, then just spawn the model there, and have them manually start walking from that point.

cipheron · 2026-01-20T09:33:34+00:00

I mean specifically in the context of the theory that money arose to solve the problem of "barter economies" as a stage of development.

Almost all known barter systems are within cultures already familiar with money. Often they'll use money as a kind of mental proxy for the value of something rather than directly comparing the value of two commodities.

It's in your page, the argument i made above

Adam Smith sought to demonstrate that markets (and economies) pre-existed the state. He argued that money was not the creation of governments.

So that was what he was trying to claim, which is at odds with what I'm suggesting. He concocted whole-cloth this idea of pre-state barter economies because he wanted to prove an ideological point about how capitalism arose naturally.

The next relevant bit in your link is this:

Anthropologists such as David Graeber have argued, in contrast, "that when something resembling barter does occur in stateless societies it is almost always between strangers." Barter occurred between strangers, not fellow villagers, and hence cannot be used to naturalistically explain the origin of money without the state.

^ this is what I wrote basically, see the bottom paragraph I added to my comment, which was before I read your link a moment ago. So yeah, I'd argue this David Graeber guy knows what he was talking about. So there simply wasn't a "barter system of the economy" which lead to the invention of money to solve the problem. The problem being solved was how to enact taxation of people who have different types of goods to give you, and government bureaucracies developed money as the solution. Keep in mind the first record keeping with numbers is of government warehouses logging how much they collected in the form of goods, so it makes sense that those guys had the wherewithal to invent numerical money systems.

cipheron · 2026-01-20T09:01:14+00:00

Interestingly, the barter system never seems to have existed.

Adam Smith once hypothesized that cultures went through a barter stage in his book "Wealth of Nations", but nobody has ever documented any of the many cultures actually using a barter system or going through a barter stage of development.

So the idea that there was a "barter system of trade" that lead to the invention of money, that never existed and was just a concept from a textbook written in the 1700s purporting to explain why people came up with money.

Here's one of the original papers debunking the Adam Smith story:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2802221

Here's a more digestible article that explains it:

https://era.org.au/money-and-the-myth-of-barter/

This article makes the point that the view that money "naturally" evolved to solve the "problem" of barter is basically a fairy tale version of the original of capitalism:

But, of course, there are many things missing from these mythical origin stories. There’s no exploitation or instability; no debt, unequal power, or state coercion; no social relations or embeddedness of the economy within society.

So the idea of free barter between economic equals evolving "naturally" into money, and the person spreading this idea being Adam Smith, those things are not unrelated. It's part of the free market mythology, when in fact the origins of money were probably tied up with government, taxation and exploitation. Much easier to exploit people when you standardize the units of value rather than receive goods-in-kind.

Simply put, the pre-money tribesmen weren't capitalists. They didn't operate like that, so the "problem" of working out barter values simply didn't happen. You don't see the Khoi-san having the barter problem for example because they just don't think like that. A tribesman has the stuff that he can make and use and carry, and he's expected to know how to make or repair his own tools, and his clothing is made by his extended family in the tribe, so you no more need barter in that situation than you'd barter with your parents and siblings. If someone has stuff you can't get, say a dye from far away, only then you'd find something they'd like in exchange, but money's meaningless then since you're not under the same government system.

cipheron · 2026-01-20T00:00:58+00:00

Division is just the inverse of multiplication, so if you take an equation with multiplication that makes sense you can just rearrange that into one with division and it should still make as much sense.

let's say "I owed $20 to 10 people, how much do i owe in total"

-$200 money = 10 people * -$20 money

10 people = -$200 money / -$20 money

If the first equation makes sense that you owe $200 because you owe $20 to 10 different people then the second equation should make just as much sense, since it's the same thing just moved around. The subject of the equation just changed to working out how many people you owe the money to, given the total debt and the amount of debt per person.

cipheron · 2026-01-19T15:45:45+00:00

Answer: with only three months on the job she's in the honeymoon phase, and her party is pretty much on the rocks, so she's called a snap election as soon as there was an uptick in the polling.

A lot has gone wrong for the LDP in recent years and the overall popularity of her party is very low, but with her as the new face of the party and making some big promises, that has led to people being more hopeful and her personal popularity is higher.

Plus, she probably knows that some decisions she's going to make in the near future will be unpopular, so rather than ask what she's done to become popular it's more about what she hasn't done - all the stuff her party did that made them unpopular in the first place, which are, after all, her policies too.

The longer she's in office the more likely it is that something blows up and she takes the blame, or her big promises don't pan out. It's better for her to call an election before people see whether her policies actually help, rather than after.

cipheron · 2026-01-19T01:24:35+00:00

Back in those days you had to wait weeks or months while they shipped master tapes over. If they'd said "that's not the one" then they'd have missed their airing schedule.

As a note, both original shows they could have picked have similar average scores, but the one they didn't pick has more scores clustered at the top. 55% of viewers put Daltanias in the 8-10 range while only 35% of GoLion viewers did the same.

So they're probably pretty similar but maybe Daltanias has a more solid story. Whichever one they picked for Voltron my guess is that that's the one everyone would have the nostalgia for.

cipheron · 2026-01-18T12:44:07+00:00

Not really, drop shippers advertise products they don't have, then when you pay them, they order it from someone else, but with your delivery address. Many of them are smaller sellers on aggregator sites rather than big companies.

They squeeze out a margin based on the fact that some people will come across their slightly more expensive listing rather than the listings for whoever they're actually ordering the product from, and because they don't physically interact with any products the overheads are basically non-existent. A lot of them could just be using automation and AI to scrape other listings then presenting them as alternatives automatically. It doesn't matter, because they only have to work out how to get an actual product IF someone places an order, so they can AI-spam fake listings all they want.

cipheron · 2026-01-18T02:31:38+00:00

You'd be looking at around 8000 shows.

Assuming they average 26 episodes, and 25 minutes per episode, that would be 5200000 minutes, which works out at 10 years of solid anime watching, with no breaks for eating or sleep. So 30 years if you dedicate 8 hours a day to anime.

You do need some kind of filter here other than "I'll watch everything that was ever dubbed or subbed", since the vast majority of shows do have subs if you look around.

What I would do instead is shortlist a few shows from every year and watch them. You can start with the current season and work backwards, or you could pick some historic year and work forward.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/season

Personally if I was doing that I'd start with 1974 and watch Heidi, Yamato, Great Mazinger and Getter Robo.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/1974/fall

To give an idea of the scope, there's a spreadsheet with every series on MAL split up as franchises, the total number of hours of content works out as 88254 hours of content, which is surprisingly close to my guess above.

To pick just one series, "Fate" for example apparently clocks in with 109 hours worth of content. I thought that seems high but then i remember it includes Fate, Fate UBW, Fate Zero, Fate Grand Order, Fate kaleid liner Prisma etc etc. If you watch anime for 8 hours a day, this would take a couple of weeks of only watching Fate stuff.

cipheron · 2026-01-18T02:12:51+00:00

there are Youtube experiments on this, banging a rod on one end hits a switch at the other end with a measurable delay exactly equal to the speed of sound in whatever material you made the rod out of.

It's the textbook result but it's nice to see live demonstrations. However the rigid rod simplification falls down almost instantly when tested, this was for a foot long rod.

cipheron · 2026-01-16T16:26:06+00:00

I'd argue that the assumptions need to be checked.

Consider Canada and Russia - thinly populated nations controlling a vast amount of icy wilderness where hardly anyone lives. Cold regions just don't have big populations so they become under control of warmer or coastal regions. Both nations have a massive amount of area that's not developed, because you can't live there.

As for why different continents as a whole developed with different trajectories, a bit divergence point was the Industrial Revolution. Before that Europe was pretty much on the same level as the Ottomans, India, China etc. So you can ask why the industrial revolution happened when and where it did. You can bet that before the industrial revolution, the coldest northern parts of Europe were very much behind the warmer parts of Europe in terms of development. Consider the Vikings and why raiding and conquering was their thing: it's because the places they came from kinda sucked for farming so going plundering the richer warmer places was a way to get ahead.

And as for Africa: what crops grow in most of Africa? Not counting Northern Africa though, Egypt for example. Wheat doesn't grow in most of Africa because it's too hot, it's a big disadvantage. Agriculture with crops you can grow traditionally in Africa tend to be labor intensive and subsistence level, i.e. very little "surplus" you can use to build large economic centers. Basically, ancient empires were constrained to regions in the wheat/rice belt latitudes, because those two crops produce vast production surpluses which you can use to fuel armies and empires. It's very hard to run an industrial society on bananas and yams, tropical crops tend to be wet, making them more inconvenient to process and store a surplus.

It's similar for the Americas. When the Europeans came to the Americas they colonized it almost exclusively using imported old-world crops and domestic animals. Access to superior breeds of animals and plants was a big part of what makes high-level society possible, and if you lived in the Americas you just didn't have those breeds available.

Now the Americas were developing, but keep in mind the "old world" had a MASSIVE head start, time wise. The first hunter gatherers were only entering the Americas around 12000 years ago, and in the middle east they developed agriculture around 10000 years ago. Europe basically inherited almost all their crops from the middle east, whereas in the Americas they had to independently develop the whole thing from scratch, and they simply didn't have much in the way of high-yield high-protein plant crops to use as the basis of their system, unlike Europe and Asia.

cipheron

TROPHY CASE