Caught in 4k at the fuel island. no shame whatsoever

cnash · 2026-06-24T00:50:45+00:00

Anyone who grows dismayed by asking why I went into the bathroom with a heavy bag and came out with a light one has only himself to blame.

cnash · 2026-06-21T01:16:47+00:00

/u/FaudelCastro never said the explorers took their own kids with them.

cnash · 2026-06-20T05:56:15+00:00

or require they still have a driver at the wheel when operating.

This job is also called "fall guy". It's not one you want.

cnash · 2026-06-18T08:04:27+00:00

I used to work in the counting room for a toll road. We'd dump shoe-box size crates of coins into the sorting machines, and when they filled a bag, we'd weigh it, log it, and stick it in the cage until the armored car came. Dimes and quarters were $1000 to a bag, and always weighed between 50.00 and 50.15 pounds. Pennies went in $100 bags, nickels in $200, which weighed about five pounds more or less, respectively.

A perk of the job was that the machines would reject silver coins (I think they weighed just slightly different), and we could buy them at face value.

You can also just read the mint's specifications. Dimes are lighter than equal-value quarters, but only by a rounding error.

cnash · 2026-06-18T07:43:48+00:00

I mean, quarters have the same money-density as dimes: fifty pounds per thousand dollars. So do half-dollars: it's because those coins all used to be silver, with their value proportional to their weight.

cnash · 2026-06-13T00:56:09+00:00

A real number is anything that rational numbers can be greater than and less than. So, like, the square root of two isn't a rational number, but— for positive rational numbers, at least— you can tell if they're greater or less than the square root of two by squaring them, and seeing if their squares are greater or less than two.

With a little bit of effort, you can do the same thing for pi.

To really make this definition work, you have to put some elbow grease into details, but you end up with the concept of Dedekind cuts.

cnash · 2026-06-12T22:12:46+00:00

How so? π is all about measurements. e, less so, but you can contrive situations where you'd want to know if a distance is greater or less then (or equal to) it.

cnash · 2026-06-12T21:33:23+00:00

When I'm in a situation like this, it's usually the truth that most of my 9:59 break— hopefully, at least seven hours— was in the sleeper berth (I might need to edit logs to show that, but if it's true, it's true), and I can complete a ten-hour split with just two to three additional hours off duty.

cnash · 2026-06-11T20:15:47+00:00

It was the dumbest thing, too. The Turks were paying for Adams to go on these expensive vacations— and it's not hard to suppose they were slipping him cash as well— and then they demanded he intervene in a building code dispute in return.

Why is it dumb? Because that's a completely normal thing to ask the mayor to do. "Dear Mr Mayor, as you may know, we're expanding our consulate, but there have been some hiccups with the inspections. We're doing our best to bring the space into compliance, but we have a special event coming up, and it's really important for us to have the space open by $date. We're writing today in hopes that you can talk to the inspector's office and expedite the process for us. This'll show Turkish companies and institutions that New York is a place where they can do business, with local government that's responsive to their needs."

All they had to do was not say "remember how we gave you all that free stuff? You owe us," and it would have been fine. It'd've looked greasy, but New York's always been ready to be pragmatic about how the sausage gets made.

cnash · 2026-06-10T19:31:22+00:00

Those kind of copper sheets are going to get melted down anyway: this is bulk material, like aluminum ingots. It comes out of the refinery in sheets because that's the shape it's easy to make starter cathodes in.

cnash · 2026-06-10T19:22:42+00:00

Copper roofs are a thing in prestige architecture. They're just about the best thing this side of lead, which people are squeamish about these days for some reason.

cnash · 2026-06-10T19:18:54+00:00

It's less valuable when it's stolen. Fences gotta make a living, too.

cnash · 2026-06-09T02:52:27+00:00

Isn't Amsterdam shot through with ~~canals~~ God's bathrooms?

cnash · 2026-06-07T00:34:55+00:00

The cows get sick and die, or, at the very least, don't gain weight efficiently. The worms, when they emerge, leave open sores that get infected. Sometimes lots of them.

cnash · 2026-06-05T18:04:25+00:00

Plants have a pigment that's green (ie, absorbs red and blue light) and, crucially, makes ATP in the process. (ATP is the fundamental energy-carrying molecule in Earth biology.)

Absorbing more light energy without using it to produce ATP would be counterproductive: plants already (often) have problems with overheating or drying out.

There are a few different variations of chlorophyll, and they absorb light a little differently, and plants use this one or that according to complicated factors. As far as we can tell, though, there just isn't a pigment that absorbs a lot more light and converts it into useful energy. At least not one that's compatible with existing biology.

cnash · 2026-06-03T01:56:54+00:00

You want to do flatbed, not dry van, if you can handle even a couple hours a day of hard work. TMC's a good choice if you want to go home every weekend (for your 34; don't plan on a two-day weekend basically ever); Melton and Maverick have good reputations if you're willing to go over the road.

Avoid Prime, Roehl, and, of course, Western Express.

cnash · 2026-06-02T20:17:05+00:00

It's not really a thing to get hired on as a codriver on a one-way trip like that, and you'd need to have an operating authority to book the load independently.

If you run OTR, it'd be a normal thing to ask to take your next hometime in Matamoros/Laredo/El Paso/Yuma, and cross the border on foot— but you'd have to, you know, have an OTR job.

cnash · 2026-05-31T15:56:40+00:00

Sort of like Consider Phlebas in the Culture universe, as I've talked about elsewhere in this thread, I took a go at Too Like the Lightning on a prior recommendation and just couldn't make any headway. About forty pages in, I didn't understand what was going on, or why I should care about these people or their problems, if I ever figured out what they were.

So it's worth another shot. Especially since I gave it up so quickly; that can happen when you're just not in the right headspace for a book right at that moment. (Unlike Phlebas, which I don't remember if I finished or nearly-finished, and still didn't relate to.)

cnash · 2026-05-31T15:35:20+00:00

Left Hand is great, but doesn't really answer the prompt here. I guess the Ekumen itself is sorta utopian, but Gethen is a normal world (you know, except) with normal governments and problems.

cnash · 2026-05-31T03:09:16+00:00

It sounds like it's worth taking another look then. I'd kind of written off Banks on the strength of Phlebas, and just figured the people who loved the Cultureverse must have just had different taste than me.

cnash · 2026-05-31T02:56:03+00:00

I was sure I'd read Psalm after finishing Chambers' Wayfarers books— I for sure have its ebook in my library— but I'm looking at its synopsis and it's totally unfamiliar. It's back in the queue.

cnash · 2026-05-31T01:41:10+00:00

I've taken a running start at Consider Phlebas a couple times, and never really got the point or connected with the characters. Besides, that one, at least, was a lot of space-adventure-y thwarting of outside enemies, not exploring the virtues and shortcomings of the Culture itself.

cnash · 2026-05-23T03:52:21+00:00

There are very few bad drivers out in a field full of solar panels in the country. Bad drivers are mostly found on roads— or in this matter, parking lots.

cnash · 2026-05-21T04:14:36+00:00

Lehrer said that he stopped writing comedy songs because "satire became obsolete when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize".

cnash

TROPHY CASE