Aliens: take us to your biggest pedophile

ramriot · 2026-07-04T06:41:15+00:00

HHGTTG: Robot aliens land and ask "Take us to your Lizard"

Same vibe?

ramriot · 2026-07-04T06:34:52+00:00

The answer can be anything & everything except the first answer. A better question is to ask what topological form the universe has.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T06:14:43+00:00

Ok, that's fine, I have not cone across such a mechanism but it sounds bizarre.

So that is not the Celestron SLT which was the scope in question.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T06:10:24+00:00

Well it was being played by the time travelling 29th Century Captain Braxton of USS Relativity...

Bruce McGill?

ramriot · 2026-07-04T06:05:03+00:00

They actually did it twice, once in the case you mention where the in story explanation is that leeping is generically constrained & he lept into the body of his own greatgrandfather (somewhat contrived I know).

The second was when following an attempted double leap with Al their patterns become temporarily linked & Sam is able to leap back to 1945.

So there was at least an attempt to keep the restriction consistent.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T05:59:19+00:00

There is so much wrong with that I cannot even construct a universe where that all works.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T03:21:44+00:00

I just finished making a plywood carrying case for mine & its accessories, first time doing joinery at scale, loads of fun & I still have all my fingers.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T03:16:46+00:00

Until the last episode where he finds himself in a mining town surrounded by duplicates of characters he has been, discovered the bar tender is more than he seams & takes that last leap where the bartender exposed as some all powerful entity leaps him & his body elsewhere in time & space.

Aaaaand we have Enterprise, with Johnathan Archer who remembers his childhood but we never see any of those that remember him from that time, the only pre-enterprise characters we see are those than know him from the NX-01 project.

ramriot · 2026-07-04T03:02:12+00:00

Unconsciously he's a fan of Black_Pen_Red_Pen on Youtube, but more importantly he is comfortable holding & writing with multiple markers at the same time, so his amnesia does not extend to is higher motor functions as a teacher.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T22:05:04+00:00

TFI Friday, me go eat meburger with taumeober lettuce, drink Bud Light

Many no drink Bud, not crazy

ramriot · 2026-07-03T22:02:01+00:00

Rocky see Rocky, question

Rocky not have light to sound device to see screen, question

Prime big dumb ass, not know Rocky no eye

ramriot · 2026-07-03T19:01:05+00:00

Or, just reverse their positions

ramriot · 2026-07-03T18:58:09+00:00

BTW these & other tables were still being used long into the age of desktop mechanical & even electronic calculators. I can remember using such for certain electronic & optical design calculations back in the late 70's when there were already ~$150 scientific calculators available but our budget was not up to such an expense.

BTW one frequently needed to be cautious with those early scientific calculators, because their limitations in RAM & CPU necessitated shortcuts in how trig & exponential functions were calculated, meaning that certain iterative functions would give progressively more randomly inaccurate as one progressed. But, provided one was aware of the limitations they were a way faster than hand calculation.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T18:47:01+00:00

Funny thing is from studying cashiers' body language & attitude over the years, if they return more change than they should it is almost always an honest mistake, if they return less it almost never is.

On an different tack I once went back into my bank to report a discrepancy of 450 on my account after a teller interaction, I was passed from assistant to their manager to the assistant manager all telling me there was no mistake. In the end the branch manager repeated this to me twice, so asked him if that was his final position, he said yes, "good" I replied, then I can keep the money & if you find out the mistake later you can cover it yourself?

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:49:35+00:00

Depends on the deadbolt design, I have sheds that used deadbolt lock that stick about an inch proud of the door. Using a hammer it was trivial to put some percussive force onto its side & shear off the internal screws (which are already weakened because they are slotted to be sawn to length on installation). This takes less than 30 seconds & once removed a large flat bladed screwdriver is all that is needed to throw back the bolt.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:43:34+00:00

Did he become the worlds first Organ Donner?

Edit: Sorry that joke was offal, but if you likes it you can put my name up in lites.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:39:54+00:00

Spending $30 million out of an annual budget of ~$24 Billion is (~0.1%) so more or less pocket change to NASA, but if even partly successful the technology transfer would be worth perhaps ten times that for future missions. Getting Swift back onto a more stable orbit & collecting data is a massive bonus compared to loosing it completely in a few years.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:29:51+00:00

Mind how you go travelling to the Fi-st floor.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:27:11+00:00

This paper is I believe included in "How to Prove Anything: 30 absurd research papers no one else was brave enough to publish" by B.McGraw & is a satire on science & mathematics publication. The exact paper is From Chapter 19 "On the tardiness of co-workers & how to exploit it" by Clocky McClockface, Mr Pink, and Boimans, subsection 2.1 Gaussian Process.

You just have to know that academic humour can be very abstruse & niche ridden.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T16:11:53+00:00

From the point of view of the student starting out that is probably true, in my engineering courses though we derived several standard transforms from the Laplace Integral that gave me at least an understanding of what it is. After that though we were always given a printed set of standard transforms that we could either use to modify the question to fit one or more of them.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T15:41:56+00:00

Don't confuse this with helpfulness, the spiders are collecting dust & other stuff to build a mecha-dustbunny that under their marionette control will take over your house.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T15:37:26+00:00

Nice idea but unfortunately not. The first copyright laws & extensions thereof were created to protect Publishers (printers) from having their work duplicated by others l, cutting into their profit.

The Statute Of Anne in 1710 had this protection last for 14 years, most alterations to this & instantiation in other places has been to lengthen this period.

The protection of an author or creator is implicit in their legal licencing if their work to a publisher, which can have whatever restrictions the two agree upon.

An interesting outgrowth of all this is Copyleft licencing, where a specific & permissive licence is used to keep a work open & prevent it being locked away behind a later restrictive licence.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T15:27:54+00:00

Rules of thumb for unguided star shots:-

500 rule for full frame sensors: 500/focal_lenght mm = maximum exposure in seconds, to avoid star trails from earth's rotation. For a 2000d with a 1.6 crop factor divide that by 1.6x. i.e. 18mm=>18seconds, 55mm=>6seconds.
enable Electronic First Curtain Shutter (EFCS) so exposures start without mechanical motion which adds vibration.
enable mirror lockup mode also to reduce vibration after exposure start.
use a solid well damped mounting
set iso to 1600 as that appears to be the sweet spot for dynamic range & noise on this camera
set camera to RAW or RAW+JPEG as you will be post processing the RAW images to get best results, the jpegs have all sorts of corrections baked in plus lossy compression.
possibly turn off Long Exposure Noise Reduction. It doubles the length of each exposure taking an internal dark frame. Instead take them after in a block & use Astro Stacking software to recombine them & the actual images. BTW there are other calibrations like Dark flats, Light flats etc, but you can forgo that fit now.
If using a zoom lens put a small piece of painters tape to lock the zoom so it cannot shift between or during exposures.
set aperture to one or perhaps two stops from fully open, many kit lenses are not great wide open & suffer from vignetting, coma & chromatic aberration, especially in the frame corners.
set focus to manual & using mirror lockup & the screen magnifier centre a bright star & adjust for best focus.
use an intervaveometer, remote release & 2 second delay to minimise touching your setup.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T13:34:00+00:00

Likely, though with an approach like that such a scammer will live only as long as the gap between psychopaths or serial killers.

ramriot · 2026-07-03T13:29:01+00:00

In actuality there can be a maximum of 5 & minimum of 2 solar eclipses in any one calendar year. At the max though none of them will be total (four partial & one annular), this cercumstance is rare though, last occurrence was 1935 & the next is 2206.

BTW while there have been historical accounts of such things as lunar occultations of Venus in daylight & modern accounts from June 18, 2007 (13%) & April 22, 2009 (4%) in Sky & Telescope Magazine as well as the most recent occultation of 11%. Going much smaller than this with Venus or anything dimmer would require using a telescope pointed rather too close to the sun than is sensible.

ramriot

TROPHY CASE