North Americans probably have some cultural hangover from Prohibition about the dangers of small-scale distillation. Methanol in particular is probably overstated as a danger. Methanol poisoning seems to mostly happen from adulteration, often with what is mistakenly thought to be industrial ethanol. It is produced at very low levels by fermentation (less than 0.1%) and so at the home distillation scale there's not enough in one batch to be a significant concern. Fire, however, is a genuine risk.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...

the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought

the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose

They have. Apple has AirPlay and MFi which includes their own proprietary set of codecs and protocols for media streaming over a link similar to but not actually Bluetooth. Quite a few devices support it, such as my hearing aids.

Also, while the new Bluetooth LE Audio shares the Bluetooth name, it's a completely new protocol for most intents and purposes; for example audio can be streamed one-way without pairing first, and it's surprisingly low latency (20 ms or so).

I was taught to do it that way in public school here in Canada in the 90s; it is the textbook proper way to spell words like coördination. I was also taught that no one actually spells it that way and that co-ordination and coordination are both fine and far more common.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1978ntc.....2...18F/abstra...

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA218226.pdf

> An increasingly popular modulation scheme is Binary Pseudo Random Phase Coding (BPRPC), whereby the phase of the transmitted signal is switched between 0 and 180 under the control of a binary pseudo random sequence

this applies straightforwardly to lidar

basically: optical CDMA or DSSS

spoofing replay may still be a concern

Though if we're going to get stereotypical about national characteristics (a dangerous game) then what might be more specifically Japanese is the particularly heightened understanding of this cycle. Or at least, its expression in art, when in the west we might flinch away.

I'm currently reading Spring Snow, so probably some of Yukio Mishima is drifting into my thoughts here. (Explaining puns ruins them but there it is again: Yuki o. Snow.)

Anyone taking bets who will be made persona non grata first?

It's spoken by about 50,000 people in the Faroe Islands, which are between Iceland and Scotland. The isles were settled by Viking-era Norse about a thousand years ago and then largely forgotten by the rest of the world. But they kept speaking their version of Old Norse and it became its own language. There are many dialects and the writing system was designed to cover all of them, so it is is etymologically informed by Old Norse and it is very conservative. It's not at all indicative of how it's really pronounced. The written form is somewhat even mutually intelligible with Icelandic / Old Norse, but the spoken language is not.

Underneath those æ and ð is a language that is oddly similar to English, like parallel convergent evolution. It's a North Germanic language not a West Germanic language so the historical diversion point is about 1500 years ago.

But it has undergone an extensive vowel shift (but in a different pattern). And also like English, it has also undergone extensive affrication (turned into ch/j) of the stop consonants and reduction of final stops and intervocalic stops. It has the same kind of stress - vowel reduction interaction that English has. That further heightens the uncanny effect.

I came away with the impression that it is English's closest sibling language, aside from Dutch. Some vocabulary:

broðir "broh-wer" (brother), heyggjur "hoy-cher" (hill/height), brúgv "brukf" (bridge), sjógvar/sjós "shekvar/shos" (sea), skyggj "skooch" (sky/cloud), djópur "cho-pur" (deep), veðirinn "ve-vir-uhn" (weather). Rough pronunciations given between quotes; all examples are cognate with English!

There's an extended story reading by a native speaker here [1] if you want an example of what it sounds like. No idea what they're saying. The intonation reminds me a bit of the northern British isles which also had a Norse influence.

[0] https://annas-archive.org/md5/4d2ce4cd5e828bbfc7b29b3d03349b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXu2fuJOTQ

Repost of an earlier comment of mine.

1915: 1 kHz - telegraph lines

1925: 10 kHz - a handful of voice channels

1935: 100 kHz - several frequency multiplexed carrier lines across the desert

1945: 200 kHz - a few more lines - war time expansion restrictions

1955: 5 MHz - coaxial cable and microwave links

1965: 20 MHz - coast to coast simultaneous television and tens of thousands of voice channels

1975: 100 MHz - scaling up

1985: 10 GHz - analog to digital phase change - fibre optic and satellite

I still remember the first time I spoke to a person so far away the sun had set and risen in between.

https://thehub.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/c9Enf-how-do-yo...

Some is just shock and overreaction I think. But it is an enormous shift.

It's a tomb. The Pharoah was buried in the very middle of it. There's an ascending gallery [1] and a burial chamber, along with access shafts. The burial chamber [2] is a large structure in the approximate middle. [3]

It hasn't settled or shifted enough to deviate or crush this significantly. But such shifting was a recurring problem in early Pyramids though. The foundation work must have been an incredible undertaking.

> [The King's Chamber] is faced entirely with granite and measures 20 cubits (10.5 m; 34.4 ft) east-west by 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south. Its flat ceiling is about 11 cubits and 5 digits (5.8 m;19.0 ft) above the floor, formed by nine slabs of stone weighing in total about 400 tons. All the roof beams show cracks due to the chamber having settled 2.5–5 cm (0.98–1.97 in).

One day it'll give way and it'll just be a pile of stones. But for now it is still an engineered structure working as designed.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Grande-g...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Kheops-c...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_shaft#/media/File:Great_P...

I am reminded it's basically impossible to read cursive writing in a language you don't know even if it's the same alphabet.

Also the new HSTX (high-speed serial transmit) unit is really well suited for rapid line coding.

Here's a different project that generates a high resolution high depth VGA signal from the RP 2350: https://www.breatharian.eu/hw/disphstx/index_en.html

And here's NTSC composite using just the original PIO: https://github.com/obstruse/pico-composite8