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gattr commented on Toys with the highest play-time and lowest clean-up-time   joannabregan.substack.com... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
mrob · 18 hours ago
The set of toys I spent the most time playing with was a big bag of wooden blocks my grandfather gave me when I was very small. They are well designed, with a good selection of different shapes, e.g. it has cylinders and arches and thin planks as well as cuboids. They got a lot of use because they're so flexible in combining with other toys, e.g. you can build roads and garages for toy cars, or obstacle courses for rolling marbles. The edges and corners are rounded and the wood tough enough that clean-up was just dropping them back into the bag.

I've since given them to a nephew and I'm happy to see he gets just as much entertainment out of them as I did. Plain wooden blocks can represent almost anything. There are no batteries or moving parts to fail. Mine got a little bit of surface wear but they still work just as well as they did when they were new and small children don't care about perfect appearance. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up getting passed down to another generation and continue to provide the same entertainment. I highly recommend this kind of simple toy for young children.

gattr · 16 hours ago
I had such blocks as well. For a recent take on this, I can recommend Kapla, typically come in a large (a couple 100s) box of skinny rectangular cuboids. I had fun doing, ahem, preliminary testing, before gifting them to my niece.
gattr commented on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth   scienceclock.com/voyager-... · Posted by u/ashishgupta2209
ferguess_k · a month ago
I hope the Voyagers are not the furthest man-made item that we send into the universe in the whole civilization.
gattr · a month ago
Once we develop more efficient propulsion (fission, fusion, light sails, etc.), would you like for someone to catch the Voyagers and bring them back into a museum? I myself am not sure. (Perhaps a "live museum" instead, keep them on their trajectories, but surround with a big space habitat with visitor center and whatnot.)
gattr commented on Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world   news.ucsc.edu/2025/11/sha... · Posted by u/XzetaU8
vbezhenar · a month ago
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.

Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.

Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.

And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.

I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.

gattr · a month ago
I think it's a wrong way to look at it. In addition to DNA information content, one should count also the complexity of the proteins and higher-level structures in the gametes.
gattr commented on NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024)   data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Docu... · Posted by u/bmurray7jhu
cloudbonsai · a month ago
> No data with a timestamp after May 16th was found on the camera, so it is likely that none of the data recorded on the SD Card were of the accident voyage or dive.

Evidently the camera data was recorded to an external SSD card in the mission computer when the accident occurred.

The investigation team actually managed to salvage the PC as well:

https://data.ntsb.gov/Docket/Document/docBLOB?ID=19169363&Fi...

Sadly it turned into a compressed ball of metal...

gattr · a month ago
From the report:

> To conduct the CT scans, the large mass was evaluated by a third-party laboratory under NTSB supervision. This facility had a range of scanners with different power and energy levels and could scan large masses using a rotating table, avoiding the need to rotate the mass itself. Ultimately, the third-party laboratory attempted to image the large mass at a power as high as 320 kilovolts (kV). The scans conducted at 320 kV were not powerful enough to penetrate the object, and as a result, no internal structures or voids were visible, and no memory devices could be identified. The NTSB evaluated using another laboratory with higher power and energy CT scan devices, however, there was concern that increased CT scan energy could damage data stored on any surviving NVM chips. Consequently, higher-energy scans were not pursued.

I'm no expert, but remember reading about neutron imaging ([1]). I'm curious if that was deemed unfeasible, too expensive, or having little chance of success? From Wikipedia:

> X-rays are attenuated based on a material's density. Denser materials will stop more X-rays. With neutrons, a material's likelihood of attenuation of neutrons is not related to its density. Some light materials such as boron will absorb neutrons while hydrogen will generally scatter neutrons, and many commonly used metals allow most neutrons to pass through them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_imaging#Neutron_radiog...

gattr commented on X5.1 solar flare, G4 geomagnetic storm watch   spaceweatherlive.com/en/n... · Posted by u/sva_
gattr · a month ago
Shameless plug: active region (and sunspot group) 4274 has already produced several X-class solar flares, alas, I didn't manage to catch one during my short weekend imaging session. Though there was a nice prominence; 38-min time lapse (Earth to scale):

https://app.astrobin.com/u/GreatAttractor?i=9tkxay#gallery

gattr commented on A macOS terminal command that tells you if your USB-C cable is bad   kau.sh/blog/usbi/... · Posted by u/freetonik
Tepix · 3 months ago
Why does it mention USB 3.2 (i.e. 20 Gbps) at all if it's for Macs? I thought Macs only support 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps, but nothing inbetween?

(which is inconvenient because USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps external SSD cases are much cheaper than USB 4 cases for now).

Also, he is calling a binary a script, which i find suspicious. This task looks like it should have been a script.

gattr · 3 months ago
On a somewhat related note, I like the IO shield of my new MSI motherboard - the USB ports are tersely labeled "5G", "10G", "40G" (and a few lingering "USB 2.0").
gattr commented on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers   reuters.com/world/uk/brit... · Posted by u/alex77456
gattr · 3 months ago
> Stored on mobile phones, the ID would contain details including a name, date of birth, residency status and crucially a photo - which would distinguish it from National Insurance numbers.

Surely it will be possible to also store it on some government-issued, GCHQ-vetted digital device, and not rely on foreign companies (Google/Apple) and their locked-down mobile platforms?

gattr commented on Magic Lantern Is Back   magiclantern.fm/forum/ind... · Posted by u/felipemesquita
pavel_lishin · 4 months ago
I should give this a shot. I used to use CHDK so I could use my old crappy Canon into something that would take good time-lapse videos by snapping a photo every X seconds; I miss doing that, though now it's harder because I live in the 'burbs, and there's no particularly spots for that nearby, and anywhere that is a good spot likely doesn't have a power outlet for me to use. I wonder how long I could power my camera from a portable charger?
gattr · 4 months ago
I used to do it as well with a cheap second-hand IXUS 230 HS. It could run (at least) 48 h off a 7.2 Ah 12 V AGM battery, snapping a photo every 3 s (I used a fake-battery power adapter and a small DC-DC converter.)
gattr commented on Custom telescope mount using harmonic drives and ESP32   svendewaerhert.com/blog/t... · Posted by u/waerhert
zokier · 4 months ago
One thing that I'd be interested in is having telescope mount suitable for doing quantitative measurements, basically doing astrometry from first principles. To me solving the orbits of planets (etc) based solely on my own measurements sounds very compelling. It would be like retracing the steps Kepler etc did.
gattr · 4 months ago
Another interesting project might be capturing host star light curves for transiting exoplanets. For a number of closer ones, it can be done conveniently from a backyard with just a photographic lens. Here's one amateur using ASI178MM-c with a Canon FD 300 mm:

https://astropolis.pl/topic/60163-wasp-10-b-w-pegazie-1270-m...

gattr commented on US AI Action Plan   ai.gov/action-plan... · Posted by u/joelburget
tbrownaw · 5 months ago
Everything except geothermal and fission.

Unless you count where the fissionable elements came from, in which case you're only left with the portion of geothermal that's from gravity (residual heat from the earth compacting itself into a planet).

gattr · 5 months ago
To be nitpicky, our uranium and thorium were made via r-process (rapid neutron capture), which is not the kind of fusion occurring in the Sun at present.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process

u/gattr

KarmaCake day573December 6, 2017
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I like graphics algorithms, astronomy, Rust and Linux.
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