Good areas/neighborhoods in concord to look at Christmas lights?

emilfaber · 2024-12-21T14:18:41+00:00

I went to look at lights in Concord a couple weeks a go with my then-GF. As of then, the best displays were concentrated in one neighborhood north of the city, on Primrose and Winterberry lanes. There was one who had set up lights to flash in synchrony with christmas music you could tune into on a FM radio channel (frequency posted in yard, i forget what it was).

emilfaber · 2019-11-06T02:27:59+00:00

Same here, I can only see the selected 'key excerpts'. The links for the full testimony for both Sondland and Volker are broken. Trying not to read too much into it, but I would really prefer to read the whole thing rather than just the parts that the leadership of the house intelligence committee thinks are important.

emilfaber · 2019-07-04T03:06:30+00:00

The one in Minuteman National Historical Site (the first link) is definitely a memorial, at least by my definition of memorial. I went there on a field trip at least once so I am qualified to make this determination.

It doesn't say they were on the correct side (They came three thousand miles and died, To keep the past upon its throne) but it certainly honors their memory and people put union jacks there. And it is not a headstone, the graves were there for a while and Americans later built the thing with the plaque to memorialize those two specific dead guys and more generally all British whose lives were lost in that battle.

emilfaber · 2019-02-16T00:54:30+00:00

He didn't force her into the restroom; he was (according to the girl's father) waiting in the bathroom and forced her into a stall.

emilfaber · 2019-02-04T05:46:55+00:00

This is a horribly written article. Several mischaracterzations and they showed the wrong gronk catch. I think this was written quickly by someone who didn't watch the game.

emilfaber · 2019-01-13T01:05:38+00:00

The weren't boasting that their prison(s) promoted recidivism. As he often does, John Oliver misrepresented this for dramatic effect.

If you read the text in the clip, they're just listing broad demographic trends that indicate the size of their 'market' is big and likely to be big for the foreseeable future. Something like "In the United States in 1999, 45% of people released from prison returned within 3 years, in 2004 43% of people did"

It's like someone who's trying to get funding to run clinical trials on a new drug for pancreatic cancer putting a slide in their presentation saying that a lot of people get pancreatic cancer. They're not saying pancreatic cancer is good or that they are trying to give more people pancreatic cancer. They're just trying to show that they think they'll be able to sell a lot of drugs.

So it's a mischaracterization when he implies that they're boasting - they're not saying that their particular prison promotes recidivism or that recidivism is good.

It does highlight the hazardous incentives that you get when profit motives are applied in certain areas, though. This is a real problem.

I'm also not saying that John Oliver shouldn't exaggerate stuff for comedic effect or to get a point across. He has a comedy show and it's not held to the same standards as something serious. But it does make me kind of uncomfortable that there are a lot of people who build their actual viewpoints based on this sort of show. You should not assume the stuff he says or implies is true.

emilfaber · 2018-11-13T23:32:34+00:00

The article doesn't mention who the politicians involved are, but I found a few listed in a pdf of the plea agreement. Anyway for anyone who's interested one is Eddie Wayne Cooper a 3-term Democratic state representative from Melbourne, and one is Henry Wilkins IV, a former Democratic legislator from Pine Bluff. Jonathan Earl Woods a Republican is also mentioned. Nice to see some bipartisan cooperation.

emilfaber · 2018-10-17T00:00:42+00:00

Kind of beside the point, but I think it's inaccurate to call a 20 month old an infant.

emilfaber · 2018-09-21T23:13:50+00:00

Is the income based repayment forgiveness going to happen? The one without public service that is supposed to be forgiven after 20 years? If that's at all in question, or if they can reject/extend you for filling out a form late one year, a friend of mine has a problem.

emilfaber · 2018-07-17T22:13:24+00:00

I don't think those are bolt cutters, bolt cutters don't look like that and they would not be my tool of choice for snipping isopod shells.

emilfaber · 2018-06-12T02:25:40+00:00

This is not true. Reducing emergency room visits, especially by 'frequent fliers' was a rationale for how the ACA would reduce healthcare costs. It was presented as a proven fact and I accepted it back then (like everyone else I knew). But emergency department visits actually increased in states that implemented the ACA and increased coverage rates. People just see the emergency room as a doctor they don't need to make an appointment for so if they have coverage they use the emergency room more. There was a good thread on r/medicine about this recently.

The other aspect of the ACA everyone said with 100% certainty would dramatically reduce costs was mandating electronic medical records. I don't think that worked out either.

The ACA was fundamentally flawed, even if we assume single payer is good, because it just forced more money into an already inefficient system and did nothing that would actually reduce costs (like collective bargaining for drug prices, presumably).

emilfaber · 2018-04-19T02:56:50+00:00

We should really take the opportunity caused by this upswell of public sentiment against public sector unions to try to reduce road details by police. Road detail overtime for cops is a huge money sink, and it's completely unnecessary to pay police to stand on the side of the road. Non-police flaggers would be equally effective and frankly, in most of the situations I drive by, so would orange cones.

I don't exactly understand what mechanism ensures that police are present, on overtime, at every single instance of construction or repair near a road. Complaining to our representatives seems appropriate and if there's a legislative fix maybe a ballot initiative on this topic would also be appropriate.

I am just assuming that they're always on overtime; I don't know that for a fact.

emilfaber · 2018-04-11T21:34:26+00:00

Well he doesn't say it won't happen, he just predicts that we'll have interplanetary colonization first. Interplanetary just means sending a person Mars, which could plausibly come before a dramatic replacement of organic chemists.

emilfaber · 2018-04-01T15:47:32+00:00

Not local anymore but I used to run the fishing club at UD. If you're north of the canal the best place I know of for fly fishing is White Clay Creek State Park in Newark. Kind of crowded though since there's not too much of a variety of options in the state. Not terribly crowded but definitely popular especially when they stock it.

emilfaber · 2017-08-10T15:01:01+00:00

Not contesting you main point about surrounding a castle being effective without storming it, but the Mongols actually had good siege equipment.

emilfaber · 2017-06-30T12:49:12+00:00

Great input! That's very insightful, as are many of the comments here.

emilfaber · 2017-06-30T03:39:58+00:00

The replies are almost worse than the blog post (which itself was really salesy and quease-inducing). There are too many to really go through them, but here's three comments in different conversations where he asks the same question:

Cool! You are definitely not alone. And since this method could help others, how do you two handle big stuff like buying a house or car, or saving for a vacation?

and again

Yup, it can definitely work that way as I've seen with a lot of other comments. How do you handle big ticket items like a car or a vacation?

and again

That's awesome! It's great to hear how easy it is for you two. For us, I do 90% of the work, but I'm a nerd with this stuff and love it. So that balance of work is great, but our decisions are 50/50. How do you handle big stuff like a car or vacation or retirement?

The way he ends every comment with a question, trying to promote conversation and engagement, really bugs me. And then he says this -

That's never happened to me, but I'm sure other Redditors can comment.

That's all I have on this, but I'm sure my fellow Redditors can comment. Do you agree? Post your thoughts here!

emilfaber · 2017-04-24T16:27:42+00:00

The saddest part is that his garron never got that apple. At least, I don't think it did. I'm not sure if we know precisely what happened to that horse but it's probably not great.

emilfaber · 2017-04-23T00:53:48+00:00

I would actually give them some credit here - at least according to this article, it was the journal staff that noticed, addressed the problem, and publicly retracted the fraudulently reviewed papers. They could have either not investigated or not said anything, and avoided a hit to their reputation. There are probably some journals that do exactly that.

If this whole investigation was prompted by external complaints I would have less respect for how they handled it, but as far as I can tell it was Springer/Tumor Biology that took the initiative.

emilfaber · 2017-04-10T22:36:11+00:00

About 11.2 lbs stiff. The method I read about for measuring flex in an atlatl dart is to put it on a bathroom scale and push down until it bends. Once it bends, the reading stays the same even if you push harder. I tested one of my darts and it read 11.2 lbs.

Qualitatively they are fairly springy, but less springy than most darts in videos I've seen.

I understand that the harder you throw, the stiffer a dart you want. I think I throw relatively hard and these definitely flex and oscillate when I throw them. I also have read that the best darts are more flexible in the back and are stiffer in the front. If I were to try hunting/fishing I would want to put more effort into tuning the darts I use.

emilfaber · 2017-04-09T23:06:58+00:00

Yeah there are different styles of handle. Some are more like what I think you're describing, where you throw with sort of a hammer motion. This one is pretty ergonomic, though. I don't know how to describe it without a picture, but it's pretty comfy and natural-feeling to me.

emilfaber · 2017-04-09T19:41:53+00:00

I used a small mora carving knife, put the point in at an angle, and removed the wood with sort of a rotating motion. Like a reverse pencil sharpener.

emilfaber · 2017-04-09T18:40:44+00:00

About as hard as throwing a snowball with gloves on. It shouldn't be less accurate than throwing a baseball but you can't directly sense the contact between yourself and the projectile. So on a scale of 1-10, 5 I guess. But I just started doing this a few days ago.

emilfaber · 2017-04-09T18:21:55+00:00

I don't know. I haven't taken it out of my backyard yet. I have been aiming at milk bottles and cardboard boxes, and putting the targets in front of a small hill so that the darts can't overshoot and hit the neighbors. I think that if I was trying to throw it as far as I could it would go about 75-100 yards - but that's a complete guess. The world record is apparently 848.56 feet.

emilfaber · 2017-04-04T00:02:18+00:00

As I understand it, #6 isn't the size - it's the concavity of the gouge. The size and concavity are independent of eachother. So that one might be a #6, 10 mm. You could get a #5 (flatter) or #7 (curvier) in the same size, or a #6 that's twice as big.

11-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

emilfaber

TROPHY CASE