Anything else, sir?

Fortunately in English classes (I learned English at school) we read Macbeth. There’s a lot of layers to Shakespeare - for example a lot of allusions which you’ll only understand when you know about the time it was written in. And our English teacher dragged in a native speaker to help out with conversation, who was a student living in my town.

In German (my native language) however, we were presented a poem without not enough context about the author and had to answer “what’s the meaning of this”. Most of the German teachers I had were boring, lazy or both.

Your literature problem - I had that in German, Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig”. Yeah, I as a teenager was so eager to read about the homoerotic thoughts of an older man traveling to Venice and lusting about a young boy. Yes, of course it’s symbolic but - fuuuuck me, really? Do I need to read that.

Mark Twain has written an essay about the “awful German Language” (I don’t agree). Amongst other things he complained about long sentences.

Ha! He know NOTHING! He had not seen the works of Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann must have been hugely intelligent. He managed to write a single sentence that is too long for a single fucking book page. With a random number of subclauses in between. Exploiting all the cleartext encryption mechanisms the German language allows! With the most boring content a teenager in the height of puberty can not relate to.

I still have a visceral hate for Thomas Mann. In my 40s I thought I’d give that book another chance. Nope. Still hate it.

Ah, soon I’m 40 years past school and I still get PTSD about it.

No no no.

In school in higher education we had to interpret poems.

I am definitely sure, that neither the author’s opinion or my opinion are relevant. It is only the teacher’s opinion that is relevant.

(Do I need the /s?)

My ex-wife and me divorced amicably, so we still talk.

One day, about two years after separtion she called me whether I still had my credit card.

(Typically we pay by payment cards called ec or giro card - but they don’t habe a credit card number, so not usable for ordering something from overseas)

So I said, yes, why. “Uhm, I want to buy something from the US” she answerf with skirting around the topic.

A certain assumption forms in my mind, as she speaks on I’m getting more sure every moment.

I answer: Look, <ex-wife>, don’t try to order the Hitachi Magic Wand from the US. It can’t be imported due to the no-lead-in-electric-devices law. And even if it arrived you 'd need a transformer for plugging it into our 230V system. Just buy one of the knockoffs available on Amazon in Europe

She : “Um (pause), OK”

Some years later my teenage kids found it when they were at her place. They asked her what it was and she said “a microphone”. I swear by my kids, the “it is a microphone” meme happened once in my family in real life. (And of course these teenagers knew what it was).

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’mangiate.

Something like that, I’m no Italian.

Because 12 and 60 are great numbers to divide. You can take a half of it, a third and a quarter and still get whole numbers.

Iirc the French did try decimal time at one time, it was not convenient.

Heh thanks for explaining it, I never knew if noon was 12am or 12pm. In German we say “11 in the morning”, “12 o Clock (noon*)” , and “1 o Clock (in the afternoon)”

But typically we don’t say whether it’s am or pm, it’s clear from context if “i need to be in the work meeting at 9”

Clocks, TV listings, my work timesheet read 24h times. We read 15:00 as “three” most of the time.

Btw some software tools (my timesheet for work) differnciate between 0:00 and 24:00. I can work (theoretically) from 0:00 to 8:00 (8h in the night to morning) and from 16:00 to 24:00 (8 hours from afternoon to midnight).

So 0:00 and 24:00 are the same moment but thought to belong to the next or previous say, respectively.

I love that thought.

I just got a flashback to an open air concert I was at. It was raining like mad. At some point my beer tasted only like rain water. Oh and the second thing is, after I returned home, not a single thing I carried along was dry. Clothes wet, underwear wet, even everything in my wallet was wet. Still, the beer was worst.

But it was an amazing concert.

For an Esp32 you’d need to take a larger model which has psram. With the Pi, yes a is take a zero (Zero 2w or so). The Pi already has hdmi on board and a graphics chip and accelerator, while for the ESP32 you’d need a custom solution.

The price difference is maybe 10 Dollars per piece or so. On the PI I have 512Mb of RAM and what ever SD they put in for storage. On the Esp32 I have 8 psram or so and a tiny bit of flash.

Ah right, for the ESP i probably need to wire up a sd card, custom board, all that stuff, to just store that 24bit 1024x768bit image.

Naah, while I love my ESPs and am just build a project with one - the PI is just so more competent for this task while still being damn cheap.

A decent Esp 32 board is around Eur 5, a. pi zero 2w around 20. Compute module proably similar - customer prices.

That’s a 15 Euro difference.

Ah and my developer pool who can code for Unix is a LOT bigger than the pool who have commercial experience for the Esp32.

I can’t follow your math, at 100 units the price difference is 100x15 for me, which is 1500.- About a day of developing for a small team, if the office and hardware is free. More if you pay for those, too.

When I calculate, custom development always is more expensive.

This is being produced in relatively low numbers (thousands) , so software development is a factor. Just plopping a scripted browser in kiosk mode on Debian is cheaper than ESP32 UI development.

I’m just old enough to have been vaccinated against smallpox.

I am bordering on aphantasia, i can’t visualize an apple at all, just as an abstract drawing.

I can visualize numbers and graphs, for example 1-6 are easy with the symbols of a dice, 7 like six with a dot in the middle, 8 two rows of fours and 9 as a three by threw grid.

The thing is, I never visualize things literally, it’s always abstract symbols - and understanding “more” requires better symbols.

Decimal system is also just a symbol, I can easily keep numbers in my mind up to six or seven digits.

Bigger, I have a bit of trouble with the scientific notation - I don’t have concepts for numbers beyond 10^9, even these rather are a thousand million for me, conceptually. And speaking English right now doesn’t help, as I’m from a big ladder country while the US is small ladder: 1 Billion (German) = 1000 billion (US).

“Hardcoded” numbers in the brain go to 4 or 5 or so, everything else is abstractions. piled on abstractions and how used you are to handling these.

In computers you deal with bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes. I visualize the difference between 1kb and 1Tb, as I have experienced each of these stages. (My first computer had 1kb, the second one 64… it was growing exponentially for years)

I saw it something like that in Germany on ARTE, but they didn’t produce it themselves. Maybe BBC or so.

It was a documentary looking into several of the conspiracy theories, debunking them.

The airliner’s aluminum is the simpler explanation for molten metal than any “thermite” ideas.

I just searched for it, also with chatpgt help, but can’t point a finger to the three or for documentaries that seem to come up, it’s too long that I’ve seen it.

What about an airliner’s worth of pulverized aluminum?

And is Long John Thomas a word?

They don’t always use the latin alphabet. In University I hated my prof using the same letter over and over again in different writing systems. x, chi, Gothic x, x with hat, x with dash, x as a vector etc. etx.

This was crazy hard for me as I internally verbalize when I read formulae, so I had to “invent” different pronunciations for evey different version of x. Because (for example) one is the vector, but the lowercase latin version is just the length of the vector.

Along with the fact that people use slightly different conventions and then conventions in math are different in the anglosphere vs here - I frequently couldn’t understand a paper or script without having an idea how things worked in the first place. A didactical nightmare.

In programming things are a lot easier, because there’s much more common convention for the field not being a few hundred years old.

Aaah, maybe that’s even the simple answer to your overall post: Conventions, even if they are arbitrary, make things easier to understand.

I see i, j - I think counting loop variable. Does it matter it is i? No. Do I think “index”? Nope.

There are code bases where some clever persons used (for example) g or p for loop variables, they are just a tiny bit harder to read - until I get used to THAT convention.

When I write code, I always try to mirror, what’s already there, to make it easier for the next guy - even if I don’t like the style.

I’m reading this at 5am after I woke up at 4 for seemingly no reason.

Now try to get “clitoris” miles, but I’ll bet you’ll never find it.

It works by applied statistics.

When you littered before - with the old cap - you’d have two pieces of plastic, now they are connected and it’s only one piece.

I’m only mildy annoyed by the new lids and got used to them, but it’s the bottle cap regulation is one of those that’s purely better for statistics.

It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.

Maybe we should better just start taxing by the amount of plastic used in food packaging, as a lot of the packages get bigger and bigger just to display the contents more visibility.