jnewkirk

Extremely impressive decipherment results for this script, a long-standing challenge in epigraphy. The methodology seems very sound, and while allographs can make or break confidence in decipherments, their treatment is very convincing and leads to logical and consistent readings. In many ways this is a model treatment of how to set out deciphering an unknown script with a suspected relation to a known language.

I had a pair of these transceivers when I was in my teens, from a somewhat later period, thanks to my grandfather who refurbished them from his time as a telegrapher at Western Union. Synchronization at startup took ten seconds or so while each unit adjusted its timing and apparently sent a correction signal to the other, drums whirling all the time and gradually matching initial positions. It looked like the most primitive process possible, but worked every time.

The description of play in the article corresponds most closely to (straight) carom billiards rather than a variety of pool (or even three-cushion billiards). A run of forty is creditable; runs of 100 or more aren't uncommon among good players. There's a billiard table just behind the foreground pool table in the photo of the Quadrangle Club.

Splendid! Thanks.

Can you point me to any of these writeups? We're a local government site undertaking a design refresh, and they sound very helpful.

This, indeed, hits the nail on the head. It is not an anti-technological rant, but a proper rant against technology as an end in itself. Big-picture thinking -- on the scale of the Earth and a timespan longer than one life -- inevitably overlaps with the spiritual; which is to say, how we live our lives; and the manner of our living is exactly what is having dramatic effect on the ecosystem now.

I think this may be exactly what the title suggests: a fixed point operator.