Replying to
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social ...this one. This is Niobe. She was the best cat and was indeed fraught with skepticism
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chickenknits/3274820526/
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Matt McIrvin
@mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2he/him
I'm a programmer who was trained in physics long ago. If on Bluesky, follow @ap.brid.gy so I can see you.
796 Followers
228 Following
23 Posts
Joined November 19, 2022
Blog on Dreamwidth::
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Replying to
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I invented the Indent-O-Meter (a now-hard-to- explain fad in Usenet .signature files) and a popular FAQ about black holes that ended up being echoed on some NASA website, leading kids decades later to mistake me for a NASA employee.
Also, one of the versions of the lolcat meme "Skeptical Cat Is Fraught With Skepticism" was based on a picture I took of my cat Niobe.
Replying to
@cpi@mastodon.social holy cow, that "Metaphaser" poster might be the most 1970s thing I have ever seen.
Yeah, the Quasar robot hoax is one of those "the more things change, the more they stay the same" things... sketchy tech companies are STILL promising robot servants for the home any day now and promoting them with rigged demos.
Replying to
@asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party My first interactions with a computer were over one of those. 300 baud acoustic dial-up, on a briefcase-sized portable terminal that my father would take home from work in the mid to late 1970s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_700
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@DavidPenington@aus.social @asakiyume@wandering.shop @rgammans@dice.camp @janeishly@beige.party I was just barely too young to really have contact with the punch cards/batch processing model of computing, but it was definitely still hanging around at the time I started.
It's of a piece with the way I was too young to be taught to use a slide rule in school, but only just barely: affordable scientific calculators appeared while I was learning arithmetic.
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@vantablack@cyberpunk.lol Knee-replacement surgery has a higher regret rate than gender-affirming surgery, and that's a surgery I've gotten that was completely uncontroversial.
Replying to
@cpi@mastodon.social Ha ha, the other post I made that same day involved one of Jeffrey Epstein's buddies. Truly history continues to provide ironic glosses on everything:
https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/400313.html
Replying to
@cpi@mastodon.social By the way, though I never bothered deleting my old LiveJournal, the still-(somewhat)-active version of it is the clone on Dreamwidth:
https://mmcirvin.dreamwidth.org/400616.html
It seems to get less traction from search engines, though.
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@altomare@oldbytes.space I 100% remember seeing this diagram somewhere Back In The Day. I don't think I was looking in that DEC manual, I think someone showed it to me.
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@ZachWeinersmith Zeno was writing centuries before Galileo went in depth on the idea of relativity of motion, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack here.
Of course, reading this in a post-20th-century world I'm so reminded of the various supposed paradoxes of *Einstein's* concept of relative motion, and what it does to distance and time intervals, that it's hard not to read that in. This reminds me a lot of the "barn and the pole" paradox in special relativity.
Replying to
@brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net Female toplessness is actually legal in large chunks of the US (it's a patchwork of local laws and rulings) but frequently the police aren't really aware of the legal situation, so I wouldn't recommend trying unless you're attempting to make a point by getting arrested.
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@sjolsen the one on the right is "this is one of my own posts that I'm particularly proud of and might want to refer to later"
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@sc_griffith@mathstodon.xyz and it makes you speak ancient Sumerian, right? This is Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
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@nyovaya@transfem.social @vantablack@cyberpunk.lol there's always this undercurrent of "*I* decide what is healthy and natural".
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@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz And the funniest thing is that this bullshit has been going on for literally hundreds of years, to the point that it becomes a bullshit tradition you can refer back to.
Replying to
@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz (IIRC, Renaissance people imagined they were seeing the golden ratio in all sorts of classical architecture, but they were wrong)
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@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social ...but I'm tempted to write some Ligeti-like thing full of dissonant howling called "Here Is Your Golden Ratio"
Replying to
@sgf@mastodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz Oh, wow, I never heard of *that* angle! Yeah, there's all kinds of interesting mathematics in music but it's not that.
Replying to
@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social It actually might be interesting to use the golden ratio as an intentionally dissonant interval, like the tritone but more so. (I guess it's about 833 cents, a third of the way between a minor and major sixth?) But it's probably no more interesting than any other kind of dissonance. There's an infinite supply of intervals derived from it that are just as dissonant.
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@altomare@oldbytes.space (Best guess--it was my dad, and he was showing me some piece of internal General Electric training material that had plagiarized it.)
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@indivisibleteam@mastodon.social Won't be available for this one, but I can boost it. (And talk up voting any way I can.)
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@kfury@mstdn.social https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX9O4xDW0Kc
(CW: flashing lights, end of world)
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@Njord@peoplemaking.games Sometimes I think our cats *should have been* only cats--one is willful, rambunctious and cranky, the other is shy and timid, and I think either of them would have been fine monopolizing the attention of her humans without another cat to socialize with. But the sitiuation is what it is.