Some interesting documents from the ACLU (PDF):
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/english_kyr.pdf
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_toolkit_file/kyr_english_3.pdf
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
If you need to have this separate camera too, then the camera might as well just have a viewfinder and be a whole camera.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
I think the problem with this whole category is that it negates the biggest advantage of taking pictures with your phone, which is not that it's wirelessly connected, but that it's a thing you're already carrying around.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
A Sony camera from 2014 that sounds like the best of the unsuccessful "external camera accessory for your phone" products:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoivGxxNUdE
Amazingly, it still works. This kind of thing seems like it was the logical endpoint of the "prosumer" camera category, but for most people, phone cameras just got good enough, and people seriously into photography probably want something more like a traditional camera, so it got squeezed out.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
In practical terms, Biden declaring the Equal Rights Amendment ratified during his last days in office amounts to little or nothing, since the Supreme Court is certainly going to say, no, it isn't. I'm going to let other people argue about the murky legal issues, which have to do with a long-expired ratification deadline.
Morally, it's something that should have happened a long time ago.
https://balloon-juice.com/2025/01/18/saturday-morning-open-thread-our-28th-amendment-if-we-can-keep-it/
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
If you're on Bluesky and you want Mastodon (or "fediverse") users like me to be able to follow your posts and see your responses, you can opt in to that by following @ap.brid.gy .
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
It was the lowest stakes version of the Faust legend ever
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Dream last night: I had parked my car in a city parking lot where, apparently, different organizations could own individual parking spaces and collect the proceeds from them, with individually set charges. The last open spot in the lot had a $9 flat fee and was owned by Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.
When I went to pay, it was an old-school scheme like they had around here decades ago where you had to stuff paper cash in a numbered box. I went back and memorized my space number. But then I couldn't find the right box. Somehow it had gone missing. Spent the rest of the dream searching in vain for the Church of Satan's cash box so I could give the Satanists my money...
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
...Of course, if the answer to your calculation falls outside of the same decade of size as your input, you'll have to move the decimal point just as with a slide rule, and that might alter the scale of length from whatever your chart is using. That's a limitation here.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Chris Staecker explains the sector, an analog calculator that predated the slide rule.
A commenter on the short version of this video asked an interesting question: why did these coexist alongside slide rules for centuries? Staecker mentions that by the 1800s, they were mostly used by navigators. I think that's a clue. If you just want numbers, a slide rule is more convenient than a sector: you don't need to use it with dividers, and it takes up less table space in action. But the sector will give you lengths in direct proportion to the numbers, like you're Euclid working through The Elements. And that's better if you're working with scaled distances on a navigational chart.
It's interesting that this one also has a logarithmic scale, so you can use it as a Gunter scale to do slide-rule-type calculations with the dividers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmmRuh_xEiM
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Luna on my chair #caturday #catsofmastodon
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
(I guess a spy drone could be trying to illuminate YOU with visible light, but then we'd be seeing enormous blinding searchlights like cop helicopters use, and that's not what anyone is describing.)
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
(Also, if it's just some prankster, that prankster is at least as likely to be a copycat inspired by the drone panic as the root explanation of it. Nor is that thing going to be one of the car-sized objects that people are imagining they're seeing--it's going to be something you can probably buy at a toy store.)
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
The question the big "mystery drone" panic raises, that I don't see people asking themselves, is why these things light up at night if they have secret evil intent.
A hobbyist drone, like a civil aircraft, lights up so you can see it, and there are regulations and such about this to avoid accidents. But someone trying to spy on you or attack you with a drone would presumably not want it to be seen. So why would it present as a light in the sky?
The exception I could see is if someone is just trying to mess with your head, so then the light serves as part of its harassment function. But the far more likely explanation is that this is exactly like UFO panics of old and most or all of what's going on is people convincing themselves to misinterpret ordinary aircraft or astronomical objects.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
But I still find it utterly weird that they were still using the "astronomical" convention for lunar latitude and longitude at a time when astronauts were literally walking on the Moon's surface, as if they'd been transported into a star map. That's why the craters just east of the Apollo 11 landing site were called West Crater and Little West Crater.
I recall there's at least one recording of an astronaut walking around on the Moon joking about how here East is West and West is East.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Actually the convention for all mapping of solar-system bodies in the pre-space-probe age was to use astronomical definitions of East and West, so the compass was flipped (but since the maps were drawn from telescopic images and the astronomical telescopes in use tended to invert the view, maps by Northern Hemisphere astronomers would often in practice do this by putting East in the normal place but South at the top).
Today, when good data will often come from space probes rather than Earthbound telescopes, that convention's been abandoned and the general convention is to map them all like we do the Earth, with East clockwise from North.
I was going to say that it's relative to the body's rotation, but that's not always true: Venus's (slow) rotation is retrograde, but IAU conventions align its north with solar-system north and take its axial tilt as 3 degrees, not 177 degrees.
Star maps still seemingly have the east-west axis pointing the "wrong" way because they're still looking up instead of down, with directions projected up from the Earth.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
I was also reminded of this list in my head of places with a reversed compass rose, so that East is counterclockwise of North:
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
So the actual reason I was poking around stuff I wrote 21 years ago was that I was thinking about L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and one of the things I did around 2003 was read through them.
"Tik-Tok of Oz" (1914) has the following passage:
"...believing that Ozma was now taking an interest in the party he [the Wizard] drew from his pocket a tiny instrument which he placed against his ear.
Ozma, observing this action in her Magic Picture, at once caught up a similar instrument from a table beside her and held it to her own ear. The two instruments recorded the same delicate vibrations of sound and formed a wireless telephone, an invention of the Wizard. Those separated by any distance were thus enabled to converse together with perfect ease and without any wire connection."
(The Magic Picture is a kind of omni-surveillance video screen. But it's visual only, no sound.)
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Other observations of the writing I was doing back then:
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
One of the things that bothers me a little about modern discussions of social-media "enshittification", and whether it can be avoided, is that we're in such a Gilded Age situation that it can be hard to disentangle the effects of market capitalism from things that are just effects of scale, or of human nature.
I was thinking about this while poking around an archive of stuff I wrote on LIveJournal back around 2003 (which I later moved to Dreamwidth). I'd just started to post there more after a time when my primary online activity was on Usenet, which was clearly decaying. And I was very concerned with the question of why that was happening and how inevitable it was.
Usenet, of course, was resolutely noncommercial. And social media wasn't really big business yet. Friendster was a new thing. Facebook and even Myspace came into existence during this period; there was no Twitter. The blogosphere was big, and I'd seen some blogs grow and decay.
Some of the troublesome phenomena were already commercial: there was spam advertising, there were huge (for the time) wads of new users flooding onto Usenet through AOL, that kind of thing. But the discussion about this seemed to largely focus on scale problems, and sort of elitist ideas of too many riffraff coming in. There was no such thing as an engagement-optimizing feed algorithm yet. But there were already all these problems.
I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess just a broad skepticism of non-corporate social media as a panacea, though there's obviously a class of problems it helps.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
=> This profile with reblog | Go to mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz account This content has been proxied by September (ba2dc).Proxy Information
text/gemini