I like owls but they are not used for Falconry because they have poor lateral thinking (Owl knows how to jump to the glove inside, take them outside owl knows nothing) and because we have to follow all hunting laws (can’t hunt after dark). But for people who can hunt after dark, using an owl sucks because it’s dark and you can’t see anything that happens. Most falconers just love to watch their birds fly and it’s hard to see them fly in the dark!

Harris’s hawks are one of the smartest hawk species but I’m sure ravens are smarter. I think they’ve gotten HHs to use a simple tool but they are not as proficient as ravens. But in my observations it only takes one single bad experience for most raptors to never want that experience to happen again. And on the flip side, if they get rewarded doing something once they will remember that for a long time

Technically the US government owns the birds, but two of these are mine and one is my wife’s who is also a licensed falconer. We purchased them from licensed breeders. They are from, left to right, Nevada, Washington, Louisiana. They were shipped to us on an airplane and we picked them up at the airport.

Most of the rabbit goes back into feeding them over the summer when they are molting their feathers. I do make 2-3 rabbit dishes a year though. Last year I made sausage which was pretty good.

Yep. Frigging White Wolf sourcebooks are the worst for me. I’ll just read the whole thing as if it were a standard fiction book. The entire setting just gnaws at my mind. I wish there were long forms of the little blurbs you get in them.

So are you like just reading about the lore around it?

Info dump incoming:

It does require a bit of speciality equipment compared to regular embroidery, I thought I could get away without the sashiko thimble but it kills your fingers after a while. It’s a ring that you wear at the base of your middle finger with sort of a shield that the needle is braced on. Sashiko needles are longer and thicker than a typical sewing needle as well, because sashiko thread is fairly thick. You can get away with substituting sashiko thread with size 8 perle thread or something similar in size if you can’t find sashiko thread locally. But I like using the sashiko thread because it’s wound so that you can make a single cut in the skein through all the threads, and then they’re all a good size for stitching! It’s super convenient, just yank and go.

I definitely recommend watching some people on YouTube do it, it’s very different from what I think of as a typical embroidery technique. You sort of pleat the fabric onto the needle and then pull the needle through when you can’t really fit more fabric on the needle. I found this video pretty useful when I was figuring everything out.

There are also a lot of cloth kits with preprinted designs that wash out after you’re done. There are a few good companies but Olympus seems to be the most popular. Coaster kits or hana-fukin/handkerchief kits are great to dip your toes in.

If you try it out I hope you enjoy it!

I’ve seen kintsugi videos before, it’s very beautiful! I haven’t tried my hand at it, but if I had any broken ceramics I’d love to try it.

Right now it’s Boquila trifoliolata, a plant involved in a recent scientific publication that gets some attention for making a very bold claim. Can plants ‘see’?

This study below describes an experiment that seems to suggest they can. Who knows what the real answer will be, but this is science at it’s purest. You can scoff at the author’s conclusions but you cannot ignore their baffling observations.

open access link to article

Well the energy recovered from plant lights is actually really pathetic when using standard panels. Had to switch to amorphous panels which capture just enough energy to keep the battery sustainably charged day after day under typical loads.

Overall, the system reclaims just enough energy to run the air pumps for up to about 15 minutes total daily use. That’s plenty to achieve the goal of giving the plants a short soak in the nutrient medium which just drains away when the pump stops. It also facilitates filtered fresh air exchange and aeration of the liquid medium which is vital.

The next stage will be to make the system more thrifty with power (MOSFETs instead of relays and other tweaks to reduce current leakage when the microcontroller is asleep).

I want to add the ability to inject CO2 and monitor levels before I consider the product full-featured. Recent studies are showing that can result in huge gains in growth rates. Based on my estimates, a 16g CO2 cartridge (think paintball or whipped cream) can keep a typical 3-liter culture vessel at 4000ppm (10x over atmosphere) for a year, even if you completely flush with fresh air twice daily.

Thank you for your question and interest in my latest obsession.

😂

I’m not sure why I enjoy it to be honest, other than I just think it’s neat to do. I just think the idea of a tree with plums, peaches, nectarines, and cherries all growing from it to be really cool.

I think my favorite is stone fruit so far, since they’re fairly different from each other. But it’s the one I’ve had the least luck with so far, too. Hoping it goes well this year!

I just looked that up and yep, looks like it works! I know pear can graft onto apple and vice versa, but the grafts don’t last.

Here is an excellent article on grafting:

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/grafting-and-budding-nursery-crop-plants

There’s also YouTube videos showing the various procedures.

I would start with bud grafting, since it’s one of the easiest to do. You could get yourself some root stock and bud graft a few varieties onto it and see what happens.

Any time you need to analyze or synthesize a function or signal, rather than just a set finite set of values, the problem will in general be infinite-dimensional unless you choose to approximate it. Practically, most physics problems begin as a partial differential equation, i.e. the solution is a signal depending on both time and space. Hopefully, you can use problem symmetry and extra information to reduce the dimensionality of the problem, but sometimes you can’t, or you can use the inherent structure of infinite-dimensional spaces to get exact results or better approximations.

Even if you can get the problem down to one dependent variable, a function technically needs an infinite number of parameters to be fully specified. You’re in luck if your function has a simple rule like f(t) = sin(t), but you might not have access to the full rule that generated the function, or it might be too complicated to work with.

Let’s say that you have a 3-dimensional vector in space; for example, v = (1,0,-1) (relative to some coordinate system; take a Euclidean basis for concreteness). Another way to represent that information is with the following function f(n) = {1 for n=1, 0 for n=2, -1 for n=3}. You can extend this representation for (countably) infinite vectors, i.e. sequences of numbers, by allowing n in f(n) to be any integer. For example, f(n) = n can be thought of as the vector (…,-2,-1,0,1,2,…). This representation also works when you allow n to be any real number. For example, f(n) = cos(n) and g(n) = e^n can be thought of as a gigantic vector, because af(n)+bg(n) is still a “gigantic vector” and functions like that satisfy the other properties needed to treat them like gigantic vectors.

This allows us to bring geometric concepts from space and apply them to functions. For example, we can typically define a metric to measure the distance between two functions. We can typically define a “norm” to talk about the size or energy of a signal. With a little bit of extra machinery (dot product), I can find the cosine between (real) functions and get the “angle” between them in function space. I can project a function onto another function, or a subspace of functions, using linear algebra extended to function spaces. This is how I would actually take that infinite-dimensional problem and approximate it: by projecting it onto a suitable finite basis of vectors and solving it in the approximation space.

I highly recommend checking out The Bright Side of Mathematics if you want to learn more about math in some detail. His videos are a lot shorter than typical open course lectures covering the same material, but you still get the major results and important proofs. He has playlists on linear algebra, real analysis, probability, and tons of more technical topics. IMO if I need to learn high-level math in a short time, he’s where I go first.

Also, despite the channel name, he has both bright and dark versions of all his videos so my eyeballs don’t melt.

3Blue1Brown is great too.

I didn’t know this. I’ll have to remember it for future small talk!

Is there an ultra niche market for flashlight customization, or is it mostly enthusiasts DIYing their own setups?

I second this request

I mean that’s a hell of a thing to throw in the garage

Apparently it’s pretty common to find guns. There was a video floating around a while ago of some guys that pulled up a gun and called the cops to report it and turn it in. The cops were mostly annoyed about the whole thing though.

A safe!

big metal bar could be useful. pulling out a shopping trolley would be funny but idk what I’d do with it after

A gun?

the rope is 20m so hopefully it doesn’t all go in the water

And risk getting dragged off a bridge? Naaaah tie that shit to a handrail

don’t know yet, I still haven’t tried it out

Fair enough, here’s the Deff Dread I spent like 4 weeks building and painting!

Do it! The characters make great display pieces even if they’re not being used for anything. You can also try looking into 3d printed stuff, which is much cheaper, if you don’t care about it being tournament legal or anything.

There’s a Basketball community, though it’s small. We’d love to have you!

Haha thanks for your suggestions, I’ll look into it :)

And with CRTs, yeah, they can be pretty good. Of course, a calibrated CRT has perfect black levels, but that’s not even the best part. OLED and Plasma can do that too, after all. What I love about CRTs is the motion clarity. During motion, every display except CRTs becomes blurry. That’s the most important part for me. It makes a night and day difference for games.

I made a post about a high end CRT monitor here. This monitor can go up to 1440p or up to 160hz (not both at the same time, though). I love it.

And of course, a standard definition CRT is awesome for any pre HD console. They look awesome.

So yeah, I think we definitely lost something with the transition to LCD and OLED. I hope I didn’t get into to much detail here, once I start with talking about the greatness of CRTs, it’s hard to stop :)