Silicon Valley Redneck

Here's a concept for ya

"Fractional reserve blood banking."

Update: That particular thought was brought on by something in the morning funnies. Here we go: this morning's F-.  But...

Now I remember another concept, from yesterday, following from the observation that ATMs only dispense twenties.

Print-on-demand money!

Well... banks can create dollars, right?  So why can't they commit those dollars to paper?

Don't think too hard about it.

How could they miss this one?

Seems there's a plan afoot for a sort of BBC Disneyland, in which visitors will be able to experience scenes from favorite shows, or some such.

There are various suggestions presented, and yet somehow The Rimmer Experience is not one of them!

Just learned a new term.

Looking at this: "Oil's Minsky Moment".

...?

Like, The Night They Raided Chevron?

So I look it up.  'Tis a sudden collapse of asset values following a debt-driven feeding frenzy.  And nothing at all to do with burlesque.

And rather a useful concept, really.  Quite alarming to ponder, what with all the debt dependency in the modern world.

Look at a billboard these days,

Or the back of a bus, and there's a significant probability you'll see a stroke-awareness PSA.

All looking very-much second-person and present-tense, i.e., addressed to the driver who is having a stroke at this very moment.

And sometimes they feature remarkably non-mnemonic mnemonics, like FAST: Face, something, Speech, Time, and what's that supposed to mean anyway?

Let's try some better messages, shall we?

SUDDENLY CAN'T READ THIS?  YOU MAY BE HAVING A STROKE!

INEXPLICABLY LOST THE POWER OF SPEECH? CALL 911.

IF YOU'RE HAVING A STROKE, YOU'VE PROBABLY CRASHED BY NOW.

Break out the Prilosec!

Headline here:

LHC's 'Heart' Starts Pumping Protons Before Restart

Proton pumps, heartburn... they got pills for that now.

If your parents were gay, chances are you will be too.

Science! has at long last identified the Gay Gene, proving once and for all that it's hereditary.

The obvious implication for social policy is that we ought not to allow gay marriage, as it only encourages them to reproduce.

Anything not nailed down is a cat toy

In preparation for a gathering of the descendant*, and the cobwebs having gotten rather out of control, I bought a new Sessions** this morning, my old one having (1) gotten rather messed up some time ago, and (2) been left out on the patio.

When I picked it up this morning, Southmoon and Top Hat promptly fled.  Huckleberry was cautiously inquisitive.  I'll show him!  Brandishing the Long-Handled Cat Tickler, I tickled the cat for a while.

This, it seems, was a mistake.  When I then proceeded to tickle the cobwebs, Huckleberry was dashing around trying to get to where the tickleball was, in Maximum Play Mode.

Now, if I could just teach him to jump up into the high corners and sweep up the cobwebs with his fur....

 

* All one of her.

** Or that other name that comes up as an autosuggest after "FBI director William"***.

*** What is it with FBI directors and household cleaning devices, anyway?

Easily-guessed passwords

If you're an Evil Overlord, and you're going to use your cat's name as your password....

At least name the cat "Swordfish", just to keep things clear.

The password should always be "Swordfish".  Because it's easier to remember, and to type, than "𓂀ᚘ𐂅𒁱𓀄🍔".

The cat sat on the

mousepad.

Despite the fact that I left the old mousepad on the floor for him to sit on.

Now he's lying on the table to my left, petting my elbow.  Gotta teach him to keep those claws all the way retracted when he does that.

Affirmative-consent laws...

...Are clearly called for in Tonga.

And by the time she's said
'Hoolima Kittiluca Cheecheechee'
It is usually too late!

Now I can't remember what train of thought led me to "The Philological Waltz" this morning, but the affirmative-consent connection came later.

Might have been something to do with a bit of world-building that had me distracted during morning walkies, trying to come up with a plausible human-inhabited world of the distant future in which one could have adventures among the wild tribes.  (It calls for some oddly specific geography, but the history isn't too farfetched.)

Halloween is approaching...

... and if Huckleberry gets any bigger, I may have to dye him orange and shave his tail.

What's with ALS and ice, anyway?

Surely you don't need buckets of ice to cool ALS, right?

Regular Schottky, yes... or AS, or FAST... but ALS?  Advanced Low-power Schottky?

Let's take a look.  I wanted to use a '181 for comparison, 'cause I know those used to get toasty, but it seems they were never made in ALS.

So, consider the humble '86 quad XOR.

74S86: 50mA typical, 75mA maximum, at 5.5V.  Yipe!

74ALS86: 3.9mA typical, 5.9mA maximum, at 5.5V.  Runs cooler by better'n an order of magnitude.  No ice bucket required.

 

Wait, what?  It's some other meaning of ALS?  And it's one of those Do Something campaigns whereby people attempt to cure a disease by doing something entirely unrelated to it, to encourage other people to donate money to some organization with a well-paid board of directors?  And you think my interpretation is wacky?

Next thing you know, the Navy will be having a barbershop-quartet-a-thon in support of its Advanced Littoral Schooner.

Clearly a failure of imagination

A couple of days ago, I was skimming an article about an experiment intended to determine whether the Universe is merely a hologram, and tried to conjure up "What you mean, merely a hologram?" in, of course, Arnold J. Rimmer's voice.

Somehow, though, the voice I came up with was Sheldon Cooper.

So...

Apparently there hasn't been a Red Dwarf crossover episode of The Big Bang Theory, though Sheldon has a complete set of Red Dwarf on DVD.

This must not stand!

Try this on for size: a sort of reverse-Back To Reality.

We need Wil Wheaton, obviously.  In his Wesley-with-a-beard guise, he slips the regulars a dose of an experimental telepathy drug, causing a group hallucination*.  As they'd just (finally) binge-watched Sheldon's complete set of Red Dwarf, or at least some portion thereof**, they find themselves in an all-new episode....

Sheldon must be Rimmer; he's a perfect match.  This makes Leonard Lister.

Howard has to be the Cat, given how hard he tries.

This leaves Raj as Kryten.  Can you imagine Raj being Kryten?  The personality, the selective mutism: he'll do.

Penny must be Kochanski - the original version, not the parallel-universe one nor Rachael.  This fits perfectly with Leonard being Lister.

 

I'll leave the story-within-a-story to your imagination.  What, you think I'll do everything for you?

 

* Alternatively, they could be tired and slightly drunk, and under the influence of one of his infamous suggestions that such a drug exists.

** Actually, they should only have watched the first few seasons.  Mustn't get far enough along to meet New Kochanski, or it gets confusing.

Someone needs to make a YouTube promo vid

Product concept: Helicopter Parent.  It's a quadrotor that follows your daughter around and keeps an eye on her.

With the optional shotgun attachment, it becomes the Chaperone Drone.  (Maybe also a pheromone sniffer unit?)

For positive tracking, the subject should be wearing a transponder.  Maybe in a locking collar.

No need to build the actual product, just some props for the promotional vid.  Basically, a couple of quadrotors, one with a pan/tilt camera mount, plus a toy shotgun (lightweight plastic) and an adapter to hold it in the camera mount.

Cast... need the kid (maybe two, ages 15 and 18), Mom (perky helicopter-parent type), several leering boys (maybe one group of high-school seniors and one of college sophomores), and of course the Voice-Over.

Location: has to look like a school.  Also has to be a place where something that looks like an armed drone won't trigger a total freak-out.

Axis of shaving

I realized this morning that I'm currently using a German razor, Japanese blades, and Italian shaving soap.

But they'll all be on our side in the next war, right?

Another fun idea

If you're out and about, and every so often check your smartphone to see what WiFi networks might be in range, you'll occasionally see an unsecured access point with a name that sounds remarkably like a wireless printer.

Obviously, What The World Needs Now is a smartphone app that, when the phone isn't connected to WiFi, looks for unsecured, default-printer-named access points, figures out approximately what model of printer it's looking at, and sends a print job.

Or perhaps

Or simply

New urban legend

Y'know those QR codes that are displayed everywhere these days?  The square arrays of funny dots?  Yeah, those.

Certain special codes will give your smartphone heartburn, or even a virus, if you photograph them.

And, here's something cute.  Look up the EUrion Constellation.  Modern document-handling equipment has government-mandated pattern-recognition features to prevent copying any document containing that pattern.

Well, not so long after 9/11, the brand-new Department of Homeland Security started pushing such things for digital cameras.  There are patterns that newer digital cameras will simply refuse to photograph, and you'll think you somehow flubbed pressing the shutter button; there are also patterns that cause the camera to go out of focus, or that cause the camera's internal firmware to blur a region around the pattern.

So, for example, if you want to be anonymous... all you need to do is to get one of the special QR codes tattooed on your forehead.  Since all surveillance systems outside of a few top-security government installations are built on commercial technology, the cameras will edit you out.

Actual government agents have such tattoos done in special infrared ink, not visible to the human eye (it's also woven into their clothing in various places).  If you look at one of them through, e.g., night-vision goggles, though, you'll see the pattern.  And, if you find the right tattoo artist, and know the right handshake, you too can have an invisible anti-surveillance tattoo.

What the world needs now

Is a random-looking-number generator.

Thing about random numbers is, they don't necessarily look random.  Ask a true random-number generator for a 4-digit random number, and 0000 is just as likely as any other.

But 0000 isn't a random-looking number. 3586 is a random-looking number.

So, to generate random-looking decimal numbers... for starters, the first digit can't be zero.  It just can't.  Or maybe it could be zero, but with a low probability.  Then, repeated digits are bad.  So:

Start with 10 bins, representing digits 0 through 9.  Bin 0 gets maybe a 2% probability, and 1 though 9 get 10.889% each.  For each digit in the result, pull a digit out of a bin according to current probabilities, then take some of the probability from that bin and distribute it evenly among the others.

This should result in numbers that look nicely random, despite being considerably less random than really random numbers.

Has someone already done this?  I dunno.  I haven't done my homework.  I'm just being random, or at least random-looking.

I wonder if people would buy mugs with this word on it.

It's fashionable in some circles to put short mystic inscriptions on things, preferably in some South- or Southeast-Asian language with a squiggly alphabet - Sanskrit, Thai, Khmer, one of those.

It's not like the people buying the knick-knacks, bumper stickers, and whatnot actually read any of those languages anyway.

With this in mind, here's an ancient blessing of the Mystic East:

ჯუღაშვილი

Not bad, eh?  'Course, I just cut'n' pasted that from Wikipedia.  It should really be written with a brush, or a calligraphy pen, being artistically sloppy 'cause words of power aren't so powerful when neatly rendered by a soulless computer.

Then it needs a good story, and an explanation of what it means.  A nice story and a nice explanation, of course; no connection to reality is required.

Then, print those bumper stickers, T-shirts, mugs, and so on, and rake in the cash!

Alien invasion! Why?

OK, so that novel I'm reading: it's A Sword Into Darkness.

Opening premise: an alien spaceship is on the way, and they didn't call ahead.  Their intentions are presumably inimical (else they would have sent radio signals first), and we have only 33 years to respond!

Apparently the aliens' motivations will be revealed later in the book, and will be plausible for their level of technology and the trouble and expense involved in launching such a mission.

But meanwhile, what can I think of?

Well, obviously, they could have discovered that their sun was getting all wibbly-wobbly, and their solar system would soon become uninhabitable.  Having decades to respond, they have time for more than "toss some random baby in a tiny probe and send him off to Earth", and embark on a Strangelovian project of packing their top politicians, mad scientists, and supermodels into an interstellar life-pod.  (Shades of the Golgafrincham "B" Ark!)

Or - and this was inspired by one of the homophone errors that got past the proofreader of this book - it could be some corporation sending a vast shipload of its assets out-system to avoid home-system taxes.

No?  So how about this one: their total civilizational debt has grown to the point where it makes sense to send a hugely expensive expedition across the expanses of space to peddle their government bonds here.

What about: they departed around... oh, never mind.  1937.  I was going to suggest that they were pissed off when I Love Lucy went off the air.  Or My Favorite Martian.  What popular radio show was cancelled in 1916?  (Gotta allow 20 years for the next episode to fail to reach them, and a year for them to build and launch their invasion fleet.)

They're finally getting around to checking on their colony here, left during their long-ago Age of Exploration?

(I understand there are space battles yet to come, so none of the explanations I'm coming up with really fit.  Whatever.  It's fun coming up with them.)