vallismortis

It was centered half a mile from Berkeley Lab at 2:56am, on the Hayward Fault. Knocked out the elevators in my building and one other building, but other than that no obvious issues. We've been told to be on alert for anything that looks off. Hard to predict how this affects some of the Lab equipment.

FWIW, I've been expecting something like this. The Pacific Rim ("ring of fire" or whatever you want to call it) has been overly active, and that second 7+ magnitude earthquake in Kamchatka was definitely not a coincidence. That said, earthquakes are not my area, but it is a topic we talk about in terms of catastrophic failure of storage systems as "Hayward Fault Tolerance" where we have tertiary backups in a region outside of the earthquake zone.

I love XSL. There are some problems that it is absolutely stellar at solving. NCBI recently changed their JATS schema. No need to change any code, just modify the stylesheet and everything hums along as if nothing changed.

Nevada, seriously. This is an 'electronic craps table' where the House controls _literally_ all aspects of the game, and the players are being prosecuted for 'playing wrong.'

Twenty years ago, I moved from Michigan (a state that uses fluoride) to Mississippi (a state that doesn't use fluoride). My dentist at the time told me that I was going to end up with tooth decay if I stayed down there for more than a few years. Sure enough, five years later I moved back to Michigan and ended up with a cavity in an unusual place. My (new) dentist in Michigan was completely unsurprised.

He said there are two problems with tooth decay in Mississippi:

1. They don't use fluoride in their water. 2. No decent dentist would ever work in Mississippi.

Fifteen years later, with no changes in dental hygiene in my entire life, and I've had no other problems with my teeth. Anecdotal evidence, maybe. But that is my experience.

This is exactly the conversation the wealthy want us to have. A buddy of mine left a job recently. He worked in IT security for a plastics company that you would all recognize. In his last month, he had a meeting with one of the VP's, who said (direct quote from the meeting):

"Biden really ruined the yachting industry."

OK. What does that person do? Does he work in IT? No. Does he work in production? No.

He collects seven figures a year for presenting a particular persona for a successful company.

Think on that before you start comparing middle/lower class occupations. I'm not saying its wrong, I'm just trying to provide another magnitude of contrast to the issue.

Every encounter with AT&T has felt like a scam to me. I tried a mobile hotspot two years ago on a 14 day free trial. One bar of signal, so I returned it the same day I received it. It took them 14 days to "process" the return, and I ended up with a $285 bill (activation fee, two months service). Last year, I was trying to find a carrier that would work with my Sierra Wireless WLAN card, and ended up repeating the same horrible experience - this round cost me $180. Next, I tried Cricket Wireless, which uses the AT&T network. No activation fee, $35/month, works flawlessly. Its not the network, its the company.

I've never seen the Wright brothers beaten up like this. One brother died trying to improve their invention, and the other died in extreme poverty in a small apartment after suffering from a car accident for years. He had received tons of awards from the industry, but those were meaningless to him. He was more interested in documenting the history of his brother's contributions. The general vibe of this thread is incredible to me.

I've had really good experiences with Better World Books. However, I do wonder how they source some of their stock. I've bought several books from them that have historical value and never should have left the Smithsonian.

Wow, ageist much? My wind model is F77.

Ok, you're crazy. The GPL licensing issues alone would be a nightmare for them, and possibly unsolvable from their business perspective.

I'm still not - um - disabling, ah, hyperthreading, because, I'm paying for, ah, 4 cores on a 2 core ah, processor.