"Imagine an advanced alien race of octopus-like creatures who don't use writing. They encounter humans, enslave some and take them on their spaceships, but find they have to label things for the humans to read. Make me a font that is how these creatures would approximate our writing systems by miming the letters with their tentacles."

It's a glorious sinuous typeface which I use for labeling drawers and bins in my semi-industrial space.

You deserve your own personal typeface.

This is distinct from the FCC application they have made for another Starlink shell in VLEO (~330km) for another 15000 satellites to better serve cellular phones.

My current strategy for small installations when you have an equator facing wall or fence is slap the panels on it and be done with it.

The process is mostly: measure moisture content of wood, pick a humidity to maintain, check wood periodically to see if it is drying too fast or too slow. Weigh water coming out to monitor process.

Very low effort if you have space to allocate while in use. The wood came out well, no complaints.

One downside is you won't kill insects with heat, so you could have trouble if it is buggy wood.

Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.

Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.

Sweet Child of Mine probably works.

Comfortably Numb(ber) allegedly works, but I doubt any of the singers I have access to can enunciate fast enough. For the most relaxed of the options, it has amazing little clouds of fast notes.

MUST RESIST: this is worse than waking up to a Saturday morning "Nerd Sniping", I could lose the whole weekend to this… I'll bet Nate isn't busy… With him and the girls from (redacted) Bohemian Rhapsody could work…

UPDATE: There goes the weekend. So far I've been in a fight with ChatGPT about counting syllables in copyrighted lyrics where I ended up suggesting it get help for its obvious emotional trauma at the hands of an IP lawyer and lined up 5 singers. "enjoy the ride" has beaten "they are just intrusive thoughts".

The two categories are very similar, they are sort of aimed at the same result but have slightly different criteria. e.g. the EPA considers exposure levels, IARC requires at least some human evidence. So you wouldn't say one is stricter than the other, just different ways of skinning a cat.

• There is evidence of carcinogenicity in animals. (Multiple, consistent studies)

• The substance is shown to directly or indirectly cause chromosomal damage or mutations in a way that is relevant to humans.

• There are no or limited human studies, they are inconclusive, or otherwise inadequate. ((Note: This is sort of a "Why isn't this classified higher?" factor.)). ((If a substance isn't in widespread use, it is kind of hard to design an ethical human study. I mean, you aren't going to have some of your test subjects drink a bunch of likely carcinogen each morning.))

So this is a a classification for "Let's maybe not go nuts with this stuff, and someone really ought to check this out. And if you plan to ship tons of this stuff you might want to talk to your lawyers and lawsuit judgement mitigation team."

I didn't manage to find an exhaustive list of things the EPA has listed with this, but I found one that included higher risks as well, and in my little warehouse/workshop I identified 8 things at a casual glance that I have in inventory or generate. Proper use of these have minimal exposure to my squishy bits for most of them, and the others a well informed user should know to take adequate precautions. (e.g. "wood dust": wear a respirator)

The US does not currently fund the EPA to commission studies to further investigate likely carcinogens, so they stay on the list for ages.

It's one of those old paperbacks I know I wouldn't have tossed, but darned if I can find my copy to reread. Maybe I loaned it and it found a new home. Maybe you have it.

(Do remember, he is a 55 year old man writing this in the '80s. Some of his world view is… archaic?… in the greater society today.)

You want the Tor version from 1989, not the Laser version from 1976.

As a person responsible for maintaining a harbor in Lake Michigan, I am allowed to move 1 cubic yard of material a year, by hand, with a shovel (last time I checked, the rules change). Anything else requires a detailed permitting process with lots of limitations on what is even possible.

You are looking at a body of rules built up to prevent draining large wetlands without permission, destroying your neighbors waterfront, dredging huge plumes of PCB contaminated sediment into the active water zones, wiping out a regional spawning bed, or casting an intermittent shadow on a patch of lake bed of the great state of redacted. This is administered by a staff who will be held accountable for unforeseen damage and has limited resources.

So you do the paperwork, wait for your permits, only work during the weeks of the year when work is allowed, and try to generally make do with less than you wanted.

Toasters are refined brilliance, if done right. The concept of "done" is computed using an analog computer programmed by human experts. (Ok, its usually a bimetal strip but it is placed so that the cooling of the moist bread keeps it from going off and your lighter-darker input is biasing when it considers the toast done.)

Tear apart some toasters. There won't be anything in a modern cheap toaster that isn't absolutely required. Ask yourself why everything is the way it is.

Research the UL requirements. I have the corporate 2 pound copper ball that had to be dropped on things from prescribed heights and not cause malfunction. Make sure you can hit this targets with what you think you can build. Also check the CE, they might have more modern rules.

Be ready for litigation. Toasters catch fire. The toaster moguls were horrified whenever they saw someone's toaster under a cabinet. Decades after selling the business they were still being sued by mesothelioma suits for things like a repairman that got lung cancer and repaired home appliances, so he probably might have worked on one of their 1920's models with asbestos insulation. Don't let it stop you, but put the backup insurance into the expenses.

It's a shame. It would probably be a good thing to keep over a domestic laser cutter or 3d printer.

If the insurance company can put off your procedure long enough you might die and then they don't have to pay for it. Family friend who has lost so much hearing he can't participate in conversations anymore has been strung out for 6 months by his insurance on a cochlear implant. The final hurdle was them denying because of incomplete paperwork, that they did indeed have said paperwork which was part of the initial submission.

If Americans find this unacceptable, they will need to adjust the laws to change the incentives to the insurance companies.

For Starship they get to test staging, engine in vacuum, bellyflop control from very high altitude to sea level. Apparently all the way to sea level. They do not appear to be planning the reignition and flip. They may set the record for "most powerful bellyflop".

All the excitement is in the first 9 minutes of the flight. A little over an hour later the Starship's "orbit" will intersect too much atmosphere and will re-enter for about 12 minutes.

As for why not to try landing the Starship on water, I think they'll play with all their available fuel mass in vacuum. Those engines haven't operated there yet.

"Signaling of coding unit prediction and prediction unit partition mode for video coding" which ridiculously oversimplified to near uselessness is encoding video using a single binary tree to select from different possible encodings of P and B frames?

I wonder if it is possible to encode HEVC without using this technique and it was just that Netflix's encoders used it, or is this integral to all HEVC. (Broadcom has had lots of discovery in the US version of this lawsuit, so they could know which products and devices Netflix uses to encode their video.)

And just for a scope of the number of patents out there whose owners claim are relevant to HEVC…

The MPEG-LA patent pool has about 10000 applicable patents for HEVC and licenses for $0.20 per device.

ATT, Motorola, Nokia, and Microsoft refused to join MPEG-LA and made their own 500 patent pool covering HEVC and charge $2/device + 0.5% of revenue from streaming.

Then there are the wildcard gamblers like Broadcom - not a pool member and swooping in with patents designed to be infringed by HEVC implementors which even indicate in the patent that the inventors were aware of the internals of the as yet unreleased HEVC standard.

The article doesn't come right out and say it, but the case seems to have turned on PERM jobs being only available when there isn't a citizen/refugee/permanent-resident available to fill the position and that applying in paper was an unreasonable hurdle to these classes and that the positions should be advertised as widely as other jobs to ensure they aren't missing potential protected class workers who might like to apply.