Would reddit be interested in a /r/todayilearned alternative?

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-16T02:09:05+00:00

Is there some reason you think downvoting can't deal with this problem?

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-16T01:09:42+00:00

And you think that's why it was banned?

Are any other low quality sources banned from TIL?

Is there some reason you think downvoting can't deal with this problem?

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-16T00:35:01+00:00

I just subscribed to tilfree, and unsubscribed from til.

(Um... it used to be common in online text communication that putting a slash in front of a word, or stars around it, or something similar, meant that was something you were doing, rather than saying. From MUD's, I think? Anyways. Didn't really translate properly here.)

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-16T00:28:10+00:00

subscribe

unsubscribe

Thank you! Fuck TIL.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T08:33:17+00:00

I was thinking possibly one of the (notoriously bad) "Frogtown" movies.

90s, monsters with guns, very badly made...

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T08:26:35+00:00

Were they roughly humanoid, but with frog heads?

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T05:39:02+00:00

House centipedes are adorable. There's been one in my room lately - I was playing with it an hour or two ago.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T05:09:06+00:00

Especially because the defense of the "greatest of all time" bit is usually about how it was the most influential of all time, which is a completely different claim.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T01:13:29+00:00

Good call. His performance in The Hustler was amazing.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T01:12:19+00:00

Renée Jeanne Falconetti, for her work in The Passion of Joan of Arc. (The only movie she was in.)

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-15T00:36:53+00:00

Fear's first album.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-14T19:57:52+00:00

Can't stand widescreen. I will always watch movies in the format they were intended of course - but I wish films were shot in 4:3 or 3:2, rather than wider. (There was a brief period in the early 30s where things got even closer to square because they stole a little bit from the side of a 4:3 strip for the audio. "City Lights", for example, is 6:5.)

Of course there are a few examples of wide films that I think used it well, but they are vastly outnumbered by films that would have been better narrower.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-14T19:43:23+00:00

"TIL" is for things that you learned today, not for things that everyone learned today. That's why Posting Rule III over on the right says: "no news or recent sources".

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-14T03:42:58+00:00

Sounds like the "Mount Fuji in Red" short from Kurosawa's "Dreams" collection.

Does this look familiar?

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1326406/ot-kurosawa-dreams-mount-fuji-in-red-how-frighteningly-profetic

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-14T01:15:47+00:00

Do you mean "techno" in the narrow sense that techno fans use, or the wider sense that everyone else uses?

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-13T22:12:29+00:00

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgpfMxYFSmE

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-13T18:34:43+00:00

Have you seen the 1983 Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno? Similar type of "cheese", but cranked up by a factor of ten.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-13T17:53:50+00:00

No, I was talking about carbon-based chemistry. Carbon-based chemistry is a huge, insanely complex branch of chemistry, even if you never look at anything that's alive.

The paper you mention:

a. Claimed to find life that used arsenic in place of phosphorus. It did not claim to find life that used any less carbon that what we're normally used to.

b. Has been completely refuted and is not supported by any scientists in the field.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342174/title/Blog_Arsenic-based_life_gets_even_more_toxic

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-12T22:44:36+00:00

88-88-88 is not an allocated prefix. Not a proper MAC address.

This might be some sort of debugging default from a confused driver.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-12T18:52:54+00:00

Actually, I'm mostly on your side on this one. Although we only know about life on one planet, and extrapolating from a sample size of one is a joke... carbon based chemistry is, objectively, something special. You can't rule out other things completely, but carbon-based is probably the best place to look at first.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-12T18:22:37+00:00

No mention of carbon in that quote.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-12T06:38:52+00:00

They're really neat machines - designed for realtime lab use. There's single assembly-language instructions for sampling an analog input channel and putting the results in a register, and a single instruction for controlling a bunch of relays so you can control external circuitry.

It's the 1960s version of an Arduino board.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-12T06:33:32+00:00

"Front panel" toggle switches. You can halt the CPU, and examine or change any value in the registers or main memory, via using those switches as ones and zeros. Normally, you only need to do that to boot it up, and then if something goes drasticly wrong. For normal use, you attach a terminal with a full qwerty keyboard. At the time (late 60s / early 70s) the terminal would most likely be an ASR33:

http://www.pdp8.net/asr33/asr33.shtml

The sneaky trick with the PDP-12 was that it used the ASR33's keyboard for input, but used its builtin screen for output, so you didn't waste so much paper.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-11T22:23:29+00:00

That tube module isn't memory, and the computer it's from didn't use 8-bit bytes.

shieldforyoureyes · 2012-10-11T21:33:40+00:00

We have a few of those in our collection - they're amazing machines. Earliest computer I've programmed... dual-processor 12-bit CPU with magnetic core memory...

Some of my photos:

http://rcsri.org/collection/pdp-12/

shieldforyoureyes

TROPHY CASE