Definitely a different kind of creative thinking involved haha

To crush your tomatoes and hear the lamentations of your lasagna.

It sounds like you enjoyed it, and it tickled the right parts of your brain for a while. I hope I can find someone like you when the time comes :)

In KDE, there used to be man: as a protocol that you could use from Konqueror or anything else for that matter. Does it still exist?

I’m at work and cannot check.

Okay, TIL: it passes faster due to a shallower gravity well, rather than my expectation that it would pass slower due to its orbital velocity around the earth.

For astronauts in LEO, time passes slower because of the latter.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Did they run you through some soldering training kits or something, or were you just thrown at the problem to “learn by doing”?

Also, how was the pay relative to what you could have gotten had you focused on the IT background instead?

I’m contemplating trying to hire for an automotive technician skillset – someone that has a background doing things like alarms and custom radio installs, because there is such a nice skillset overlap. Hiring from IT might work, but I don’t think I can meet pay and progression expectations. But the IT guys probably appreciate the science aspect more, on average.

It’s so ironic. Over the last few decades you could find millions of examples of the opposite question being asked.

I need to hire a service technician this year. Someone with soldering skills, most likely. What skills did you use to get your prior job? What were you taught on the job? Pure curiosity.

Dragon Age Origins, first run ever. Had to apply the 4GB patch, and it still crashes occasionally on modern hardware. Off and on.

BG3. Just started Act III, still in the outskirts. The third act is so imposing that I’ve taken a break just to clear headspace, hence DAO above

EU4 (Anbennar fantasy conversion mod) – geez, this game is like crack for me. I’m now well over 4000 hours. I keep circling back. Most recent run was Dwarven Adventurer into Verkal Dromak – the sleeper dwarves with the dream magic system. Long considered a hard start, you’re now aided by an early game rebellion which can sometimes cripple your main enemies, the Hobgoblin country “The Command”. Much fun.

Four years ago, I was bored and talking to a friend of mine, joking about starting a scientific equipment business in a small niche (geophysics) where there was effectively only one competitor in our national market. Easy to disrupt. To my surprise, he said yes and we went all in. Still just the two of us, but I guess I didn’t have to apply for that job, just have a fortuitous connection. Now I do the science parts and he does the business parts and it works great! Probably we will hire this year though, and it’s very likely that LinkedIn will be the place we advertise.

The last tool I used? Does email count? ;) Ground Penetrating Radar.

Oh that’s really kinda useful!

Oh hi Jure of KDE fame ;)

How is KMail these days? I haven’t used it in years. It always largely worked, but never really exceled at anything.

Business people post on LinkedIn. I do too. Gotta know your audience.

The cat is cute. Work is stressful. It’s too damned hot (I hate summer). I should read more – I miss having the time.

Insert Futurama reference

I know one of the Long Dark devs – chill AF – and if they are a representation of their company culture, then I would consider this less of a snipe, and more of a business model observation one would make over beers.

But, yeah, it is yet to be seen if Manor Lords is a flash in the pan, or has a long tail (like Paradox games or No Man’s Sky or others).

Okay, so, temperature is a statistical measure of the kinetic energy of the atoms in a material. It’s useful, so we use it. But, I’ll try to handwave a lecture from Thermodynamics 300 – the actual lecture requires quantum mechanics, partial differential equations, and a dude named Maxwell.

So imagine you put at molecule of an inert gas (helium or similar) into a perfectly insulated box, and that box (aside from the single molecule of helium) is a perfect vacuum. Now, what temperature is that molecule of helium? The question is somewhat meaningless. What we can do instead is ask, what is its position, and its velocity/momentum. For an object as large as helium, you don’t really have to deal with the uncertainty principle, and can largely just treat it as a billiard ball bouncing around in there, boing boing boing.

But if you add a second helium, now you have interactions. They can both have a position and momentum, but occasionally they will bump into each other, and depending on the angles and velocity and such, they can transfer momentum into one another. Still a billiard ball scenario, and relatively easy to visualize.

As you start adding more balls though, tracking the position and momentum of each one starts to become crazy. You stop being concerned about the positions of the billiard balls, but start doing statistics – you sample a few of them, and get some new estimates: average distance between balls at any given time, average momentum of the balls at any given time. What we’re doing is moving from treating the atoms as discrete elements into treating it as a gas. For helium, it’s actually quite reasonable to work the math out from first principles because it behaves so ideally. But you end up deriving a quantity known as “pressure” – which reflects the average distance between the balls, and “temperature” which is effectively the average momentum of the balls.

But here’s the thing – just because we have an average, doesn’t mean it’s evenly distributed. In a real gas, there are big and small molecules all jostling about, and some are moving faster and some are moving slower. But statistically, we can treat it as a nearly uniform material because there are a lot of them.

We’ve reduced an incredibly complex thing to a single number or two.

Tangent: we lose some of our atmosphere to space every year, and this process is partially why. Some of molecules jostling about at the top of the atmosphere where the distance between them is quite large can sometimes bounce into one another in accidentally perfect ways such that single atoms or molecules can get to great velocities. If these exceed escape velocity, they will never return to earth. But it’s more likely that these collisions eject smaller molecules, like hydrogen and helium, than larger molecules, like oxygen or nitrogen. So we lose the light stuff preferentially. Imagine the box with billiard balls bounding around it it, but some ping pong balls are there too and they can get launched! See Jeans Escape for more details if you want a rabbit hole.

Somehow they passed though, right?

Yep.

When a historian complains that something is reductionist, I usually ask them “what is the temperature of the air in the room right now.” I don’t mind reductionism, particularly when ingesting materials from outside my field of expertise – because I don’t have time to become an expert in every field :)

I mean, he’s not wrong (historically), but that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate it either. We (as a species, a civilization, the royal we) can be better. He just doesn’t want us to be.