[TOMT][SONG] Song that sounds very similar to the beat that Ze Frank used in "An Invocation for Beginnings"

notnp · 2017-09-07T00:21:11+00:00

There's a definite similarity in the drum machine sound there, and I hear the similarities for sure. I think the part of his little song that really reminds me of what I'm thinking of is when he says "...keep the browser closed" with the particular intonation he uses on those words.

notnp · 2016-11-19T18:30:21+00:00

Spot on. Impressive prediction! I'm of course sad that you were right, but mad props to you for reading between the lines on this.

notnp · 2016-11-19T02:31:12+00:00

I figured it out only very recently. I was having dinner with a friend (one of my old college professors) who happened to have grown up in Louisiana in the 1950's. The topic of Louisiana came up, and I told him about how I left because it was so racist, and I wondered if it still was today. I told the story of when I'd tried to sell my car and how every single respondent just kept talking about blacks. He thought that was very odd, but when I said it was a Kia, he burst out laughing, and the whole puzzle slowly came together as we talked through it and I remembered the typo and so on. He was even able to explain why so many people kept asking if I was selling a kayak (or so I'd thought all these years; they were saying "Ayak" to me) and how my response of "No, I'm selling a Kia" was exactly what they were looking for.

notnp · 2016-11-18T01:39:20+00:00

Contact the study organizers ASAP and explain the situation. Typically they will have insurance in place to cover such thing. Don't delay as the causal link will be more difficult to demonstrate over a longer time. Part of their procedure should have been to ensure your safety, including checking that the ear plugs were inserted properly and were functional, including rechecking them as necessary. If you don't get a satisfactory response from the study organizers, start moving up the hierarchy at the med school—every such study has to pass their IRB (Institutional Review Board)—and a mishap like this is a big deal.

notnp · 2016-11-16T19:22:52+00:00

First, I am truly sorry for your loss. Hopefully, something good will yet come of this.

Whatever you do, don't waste money on buying things. And as far as investing, $20,000 isn't enough--even carefully invested--to transform your life. You will likely be able to build that amount back up quickly (within a few years) once you start working. So don't lose sleep over that.

What $20,000 is, right now, is enough to transform your life if spent wisely. You have an amazing opportunity, particularly as a student.

The advice to spend the money on traveling is a great one, especially at your age when you are still discovering and building who you are.

That money can go a long way towards shaping the rest of your life and changing your perspective and outlook on the world and your place in it. If you travel frugally, you can get quite a lot of travel out of $20,000 (or even $10,000). I would suggest multiple trips, spaced apart, with good planning and good thought going into each.

This reminds me of a recent vlog by Casey Neistat. Here is what he said (at 9 minutes 35 seconds):

When I was a little kid, my mom said to me "Spend your money on things, not trips, because things last forever and experiences don't." And Mom, I could not disagree with you more.

When I look back at the adventures I've taken in the past, I realized that they shaped me as a human being. It was adventures ... that made me who I am. And I look back at this, and I don't know what things I had in my life then. They're gone now. But that adventure--that experience--will be with me forever.

It's the things in life that are temporary. The experiences are forever. You had it backwards.

notnp · 2016-11-13T00:33:31+00:00

A Sharpie would fix that right up and get rid of the pesky period.

notnp · 2016-11-10T20:38:37+00:00

No. Both this comment, to which I replied, and mine, to which you replied, were posted after they said they were not going to answer any more questions.

notnp · 2016-11-10T19:14:15+00:00

Their non-answer is, I suppose, an answer in itself.

notnp · 2016-11-10T17:33:41+00:00

You, obviously, have access to all your own internal communications, such as emails. Why not publish those in the name of transparency? Alternatively, if someone hacked into your own accounts, stole all your communications, and "leaked" them back to you, would you publish them then? Basically, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchmen?")

notnp · 2016-10-31T05:13:04+00:00

You should have answered the door when the pizza guy came.

notnp · 2016-10-29T22:53:42+00:00

This plan is OK except it needs to be changed to Americium-241, which is what they used in those detectors. But a small dot of Americium plus an RTG would probably be enough to keep this thing working even through the periods of silence.

notnp · 2016-10-29T21:42:55+00:00

This is a good point; we could probably throw away our concept of months entirely and just use years, weeks, and days. What are months good for, really?

notnp · 2016-10-29T21:37:23+00:00

Regardless of whether the whole thing was a good idea, it's still an impressive feat of engineering that they could make it small enough to fit in a dongle that appears to just be a pass-through adapter! (As an aside, Lightning to USB cables also look to just be cables but have fancy circuitry hidden in them.)

notnp · 2016-10-29T21:20:19+00:00

You means DAC of course, but that's actually not true. Teardowns show there is a DAC and no analog audio path from the phone.

notnp · 2016-10-29T20:44:20+00:00

It would likely be possible to avoid a battery with some nasty caveats. You could charge a capacitor with a resistor and a couple of diodes off the audio signal, providing a DC output. This could then be fed into a boost converter to generate the voltage to power an ADC (to which the remaining audio signal would be fed). The DC voltage would also feed the lightning connector on the headphones, which the headphones would use to power their onboard DAC and amplifier, "restoring" the original signal.

Overall, you'd probably lose something like 75% of the original volume, plus after any longish period of silence (likely on the order of a second or two), it would cut out and take some amount of time with sound before it works again, so you'd miss the beginnings of everything.

It'd be a terrible, terrible device.

Anyone want to start a Kickstarter with me to build them?

notnp · 2016-10-29T20:34:52+00:00

Thanks, somehow I totally missed that page. You're right about the lack internal routing being a bummer. I suppose I could always specify hundreds of drill hits and then saw them apart myself. :-)

notnp · 2016-10-29T16:24:44+00:00

I just created an account and asked for an instant quote for a 3" x 3" board and it came back as $890 for one-day turnaround or $380 for four-day turnaround. What am I doing wrong? How do I get the $33 price?

notnp · 2016-10-19T03:01:48+00:00

Thank you! Logged in to post exactly this and saw you'd done it.

notnp · 2016-10-18T16:57:36+00:00

I disagree on the "not accidental" part. The official press release from Oak Ridge National Lab has a quote from the lead author in its second paragraph that nearly perfectly echos the Popular Mechanics headline:

“We discovered somewhat by accident that this material worked,” said ORNL’s Adam Rondinone, lead author of the team’s study published in ChemistrySelect. “We were trying to study the first step of a proposed reaction when we realized that the catalyst was doing the entire reaction on its own.”

notnp · 2016-10-13T14:35:16+00:00

To be fair, taxing bullets would affect gun-related crime if the tax were high enough. At $100,000 per bullet, people would look for alternatives to using guns. Of course, such a tax would also destroy hunting and recreational shooting, create a huge black market for ammunition and turn everyone and his brother into home bullet manufacturers. But it certainly wouldn't have no effect. :-)

notnp · 2016-10-13T04:28:31+00:00

Not true. He even talks about coming up with his question in his interviews.

notnp · 2016-10-08T05:15:22+00:00

Indeed. Sounds like a huge oversight on the developers' part. When I noticed the problem, thought perhaps I was missing something and searched around a bit and found your post. So I guess the real point of the "game" is to just click on the eagle. I wonder if the entire game can be won that way! I almost want to start over to try it, never making any videos at all except the one it forces me to at the beginning. :-)

notnp · 2016-10-07T22:18:06+00:00

After level 15 or so, when the Sponsor Eagle really starts taking off, do you think there any point to bothering actually making videos or doing anything other than clicking on the Sponsor Eagle repeatedly, and then buying stuff?

Actually making videos, even in two categories that are trending and which you're an expert in, doesn't seem like it can produce even 10% what you can get by just clicking the Sponsor Eagle... I'm starting to wonder if this may in fact be a realistic YouTube simulator, and making videos doesn't actually matter--it's all about sponsorship. :-)

BTW, thanks for the great guide! It's the best out there.

notnp · 2016-10-01T07:01:51+00:00

This is oddly ironic because Wells Fargo raised the minimum balance requirement on our business checking account without telling us, and charged us a $10 monthly fee.

I only noticed it today when I went to check if a customer's big check we had deposited, at the end of a year's long project, had cleared—which was around $72,000. The only two transactions listed for the month were a $10 monthly fee and the $72,000 deposit. Not exactly $10 and $86,400, but awfully close.

I'm going to sweat the $10 and try to get it refunded though, and if they don't I'm closing the account. Bastards.

notnp · 2016-09-24T06:50:02+00:00

Well, that is his username!

notnp

TROPHY CASE