I didn't know this. Thanks.

Best wishes,
Bob

From the NASA website.

"Without thermal controls, the temperature of the orbiting Space Station's Sun-facing side would soar to 250 degrees F (121 C), while thermometers on the dark side would plunge to minus 250 degrees F (-157 C)."

That's the sort of thing I had in mind.

Best wishes,
Bob

Use solar panels for energy, perhaps with an additional small reactor.. Put the hardware in the shade of the solar panels. Energy + cooling in one package. Not very good for low latency computing, but okay for jobs where the run takes a longer time, and the results don't have to be immediately available.

(Probably won't work, or be cost effective. Just a speculative daydream.)

Best wishes
Bob

Dropping support for .dvi files?

Best wishes,
Bob

If you are going to be very careful, the "there" at the end of your first sentence should be in quotation marks, since you are mentioning it rather than using it.

Best wishes,
Bob

Back in the day (1970s), when I was a Radioman on a USCGC, we used sneaker net for getting keys. I would check out a pickup truck, and a .45 (perhaps there were two of us), then drive to the main comm centre to get the codes (early) or punch cards (later) for the ship's KW-7 / Orestes (encrypted teletype).

Best wishes,
Bob

Excellent!

Perhaps related. After the beginning of the pandemic, one of my students said he now knew what I meant when I had said the year before that "these are the good old days".

I've just retired after teaching for 28 years at the same college (Oxford). The really noticeable differences between the students then and now is their taste in music, and that they submit typed essays rather than hand written ones. They are bright, polite and rather accommodating to the old dinosaur (me).

Best wishes,
Bob
   

In my 40+ years doing philosophy (undergraduate to now -- retiring at the end of this month) I've never had the fortune of engaging in a discussion of angels and pins. However, I have thought about, and discussed the possibility of there being things with location, but no dimensions, which may not be a million miles away, as it were. Points (as in geometry) come to mind. Some also think that if Descartes would have modelled the mind as a point type object, that would have solved some problems with his view about the mind. He would still have had plenty of problems left, of course.

Best wishes,
Bob

When I was a grad. student, I had a tee shirt printed with "Free the bound variables!". :)

Best wishes,
Bob

*Naming and Necessity* was published in 1980 or 1981. However, it was based on the 1970 lectures, and a Xeroxed manuscript was floating around.

His contribution to discussion of modality, i.e., possibility and necessity, wasn't in distinguishing them, or even in developing the logic of modality, but rather in giving the semantics of modal claims. Think of it as giving an interpretation or model of modal logic. So, for example, (nearly) everyone accepted that if something is necessarily true is possibly true. Kripke gave an account of what made this true. If something is true in all possibly worlds, then it is true in at least one possible world. The cool thing is that once possible worlds are introduced, modal logic can be understood using 1st order logic (quantifying over possible worlds). Granted, the metaphysical status of possible worlds is a bit tricky.

The innovation about naming is that instead of names being short hand for descriptions (can we refer to something if the description is even partially incorrect, which it almost certainly is?), he proposed that we can refer with names if we stand in an appropriate causal chain to the introduction of the name (the original dubbing).

RLF

When I was an undergraduate at Western Washington University in 1978 or 1979, the philosophy faculty invited me to accompany then to Kripke's *Naming and Necessity* lectures at one of Vancouver universities. They were the first set of "big time" lectures I attended. I was astounded. Not just by the content but by the fact that the lectures were so clear, and given without notes. (An aside: my wife did the index for *Naming and Necessity* while a grad. student. :) )

Best wishes,
Bob

Would there be any difficulty in playing in-person games in a Faraday cage?

Best wishes,
Bob
 

Some people think that Apple are innovative and make good hardware. You can see where they want to be innovative. They could have been innovative when it comes to making their hardware more easily repairable (and more sustainable).

Best wishes
Bob

Here's what I do with the Panasonic Toughbook CF-MX4 I'm using for this post.

Step 1: Make sure secondary (small) battery has some juice, so you don't have to shut down the laptop when changing the main battery.
Step 2: Slide out old main battery.
Step 3: Slide in new main battery.
Step 4: Continue using laptop.

Best wishes,
Bob

I'm afraid that it looks like the G4 is not officially supported by Lineage, although there may be an unofficial port. In any case, I've been happy with Lineage OS. (On various phones and tablets.)

Best wishes,
Bob