Peter Whitaker

@BunkerDwellerYT youtu.be/sP6eaQX8_90?si…

I realize that I am yearning for a game with the aesthetic of a 70s/80s fantasy painting

@MarcusCVance Renaissance Italy came up with a solution for this: folding polearms.

You've just accidentally stumbled upon a massive reason why swords were used by numerous cultures throughout history.

@doberes The planet Cadwal from the Cadwal Chronicles is a perfect exercise in worldbuilding. Peak coziness of a self-contained world-in-miniature, while also evoking the wistful melancholy one finds in Gene Wolfe novels.

Lyonesse

@TierZoo @bandorexic -10 kilocalories per step would be lethal, but lower case c calories are one thousandth of an upper case C Calorie, so you are only losing around 100 Calories in a normal day of walking.

@bandorexic lol you'd literally die if you take the calories

@BeSaintly Good day = It is a good day (because I have met you)

Goodbye = God be with you Holy smoke = election of a Pope Breakfast = break the fast Holiday = Holy Day People have forgotten who they are, they don’t even know what the words they are saying actually mean.

@SciFiArchives Concept art for Minority Report by James Clyne.

An epic Paris of the future, illustrated by Moebius, aka Jean Giraud.

@salwanese @MissPavIichenko Soyen Shaku was abbot of Kenchō-ji and served as a chaplain in the Japanese army in 1904. Leo Tolstoy wanted to make a joint statement advocating for pacifism. Soyen Shaku refused Tolstoy's request and argued that Buddhism requires going to war. note.com/nemuro_t/n/ndd…

@MissPavIichenko u look at early japanese history they were legit throwing buddhist buzzwords left and right to justify why we should kill everyone and ourselves

Buddhism in the West: Buddhism isn’t a REAL religion, it’s more of a philosophy! It’s all about mindfulness and being peaceful! Buddhism in Asia:

@transandtrad This pdf is a fascinating glossary of Euro English words that have acquired new meanings not standard to English. eca.europa.eu/other%20public…

Americans aren’t aware that Europeans have their own varieties of “EU English” that are riddled with errors that derive from imposing their own language’s rules onto English. Thinking that “toast” is a kind of bread rather than literally just toasted bread is a great example.

@ah0ge0 @IkenoYuki My shoe size is 27.5 cm which makes my shoes 1 foot long ±¼ inch. After calibrating my work boots with a tape measure to verify they are 1 foot long, I walk heel-to-toe to measure distances in a professional capacity.

@IkenoYuki そういうスケール使わない人に、ここから10フィートでって言うと自分の足で測り始めるんですかね。

アメリカ人に『これを1インチ(=2.5cm)ずつに切って』とお願いすると、1.5cmから4cmくらいのバラバラの大きさの短冊が仕上がる。ふと気づいた。アメリカ人にとってインチとは単位ではなく概念に近く、1インチとは「ハーフインチでもなく2インチでもない長さ」と理解することで納得できた。センチ使え

@sigilante This is what low pH water looks like, by the way. Acids are commonly said to release protons into solution, but when they do, the proton does not float around freely. It bonds with H20 to form H30 and then it quickly gets passed around across hydrogen bonds.

Liquids have internal local structure (see e.g. significant structure theory) as molecules align via hydrogen bonding. I wonder if liquids which have sat for very long times are almost crystalline in form.

@gotti612 @UnionPacific Self-driving cars are here. It's too late for passenger rail. @UnionPacific is right to scorn Amtrak.

@UnionPacific I’m sure yall are willing partners with the FRA and Amtrak to expedite mutually beneficial shared investments to allow for high-speed passenger rail, correct?

A seamless rail network reduces bottlenecks and eliminates unnecessary handoffs between carriers. The result = more reliable service for customers across the country.

@lavidaenvinetas Basic Black (1967) directed by William Claxton youtube.com/watch?v=3TALJH…

Reccardi

@sede_killer GUD SESON 4 CROPS BET U DIDN EVN KNO THAT

the average medieval peasant had more knowledge of the practical realities of life than the average american has right now

@kamipapa2 私は、荒れ果てた爪のペアであるべきだった 静かな海の床を駆け抜ける。

これ、ずっと人に会えない海の底のカニに転生した人だとして ようやく会えた人に「まって、置いていかないで！！」って必死に追いかけたけれど、思いが通じるはずもなく引き離されていって… って考えるとエモくない？(´・ω・)

@TonySADX The black outline on Lemmy and Wendy is consistent with the art style of SMW2 Yoshi's Island. Super Mario World has a mix of sprites with and without black outlines, while SMW2 uses them consistently.

I can no longer unsee Mario World's art style inconsistencies and the worst thing about it is even the koopalings don't have a matching style

@davepl1968 This PowerPoint presentation provides a good summary of how automatic air brakes work. nmramcrdiv10-old.yolasite.com/resources/Arti…

@davepl1968 Automatic air brakes on freight trains are fully analog with no electronics. They work like simple computers. Each car in the train has an automatic brake valve that can perform a half dozen functions in response to pressure changes coming from an air compressor on the locomotive

This a computer, and you likely own one. It's a hydraulic analog computer. It’s essentially a machined analog computer that computes with fluid instead of electronics: pump pressure is routed through passages that act like wires, while spool valves, springs, orifices, and check balls perform the equivalents of comparators, logic gates, delays, and one-way elements. What it “calculates” is the machine’s current operating state, whether conditions have crossed a threshold to justify changing state, how strongly to apply each output, and how quickly to make that transition without instability or shock. It does this by continuously balancing forces—pressure on different valve areas against spring preload and feedback pressure—so each valve shifts only when one hydraulic condition outweighs another, while restrictions and chambers add timing and smoothing. In plain English, it is a real-time fluidic state machine that solves “if this pressure is greater than that one, route flow here; otherwise hold, delay, soften, or override” entirely through geometry and oil. They're used in every car with an automatic transmission, where it makes choices like what gear to be in and how hard to apply clutches, etc.... And some dude worked it all out on paper back in the 1960s.

@t_okada People replying to you say that the maze of channels inside that automatic transmission are not part of a hydraulic computer even though they resemble one. Railway air brakes are a real example of a pneumatic computer. gsd.cocolog-nifty.com/signal/2021/01…

これ「油圧式コンピューター」よね。こんなの量産してたんだからすごい。

@MikeNayna @christopherrufo What they need is a supercomputer to simulate an alternate timeline where Aboriginals Australians imported modern technology but with no settlers immigrating onto the continent. Then they could download cultural artifacts from this simulated universe and claim them as their own.

@christopherrufo The funny thing about this field is that the “decolonised” Indigenous culture it produces is about as authentic as Outback Steakhouse is to Australian culture. It’s all a weird effort to strip back Euro influence from two centuries ago to recolonise with American social theory.

And yet, none of these post-colonial theorists want to "decolonize" electricity, antibiotics, and other oppressive constructs of the Western world, in order to return to the authentic indigenous ways of the darkened teepee and dying from a small scratch on the leg.

@troutfishfarms @ThraxMaximilian Jack Vance could string together multiple three-act narrative arcs into a single epic novel.

As late as the early 70s, a novel could be 120 pages long. Then came the paperback boom and the transition to trades. The extension of length was the product of corporate meetings and very cynical consumer psychology. It had and still has nothing to do with literature