at first, but only for 12 parsecs or so . . .

M immediate reaction was to wonder if 3d printers will join C & Perl with annual obfuscation contests?

I mean, it depends on exactly how fast the water is moving (as well as how deep it is; both things matter). If we're talking normal river current (say, 1 foot per second), most adults can stand in eighteen inches and be fine, if it doesn't catch them off guard. If the current is faster, then it doesn't have to be as deep to have essentially the same effect, or if it's deeper, it doesn't have to be as fast.

There are of course some caveats to the above. One is, once you get past about 4-5 feet deep (depending on the person), you're floating or swimming anyway, so additional depth doesn't matter very much at that point; but additional velocity still makes a difference.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm from the Midwest. There's no room in the garage for a _car_ of all things, haha, that would be ridiculous. No, the garage is where we keep the garage stuff. You know, the lawn mower, snow blower, garden tools, step ladder, extension ladder, bicycles, sawhorses, sports gear, extra bricks left over from when the patio was put in, spare pieces of plywood, hedge trimmers, mattocks, old paint buckets, hula hoops, bungee cords, antifreeze, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, and so on and so forth. There are four people in this household, so the garage is pretty much full. It think there might be a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor out there.

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Am I the only person on the planet who still opens the garage door with, you know, my hands? Is that completely crazy? Am *I* crazy?

The general dearth of atmosphere, is the main thing that would be holding Mars back from having any really substantial weather phenomena, including lightning like we see on Earth. But apparently there is just about enough atmosphere to support... this version of it.

>But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one
>would expect it to think over which sorts of
>numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates,
>etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

and even then, it doesn't affect the chance of *winning*, but rather the chance of being the *sole* winner, as opposed to having to share the price.

[there *is* another possibility, though, albeit unlikely: it could come across a flaw in the RNG that lets it avoid less likely combinations, or choose a more likely one. Again, though, this requires an RNG flaw.]

just like when it hit three digits?

>Mexico has a half peso coin, worth about 2 cents.

and a peso was like a dollar.

I recall my aunt feeling guilty about what she was paying down there when it dropped to about eight to a dollar.

And then they lopped three zeroes off to get the new peso.

I *think* this is half of those one-thousands of the prior peso . . .

After extreme inflation, small matters of rounding aren't even on the radar for what's important.

[Let alone the 27 or so zeroes lopped off in Germany {where, near the end, workers were reportedly paid twice a day, with their wives bringing wheelbarrows to collect, and rushing to spend it before it fell further! (which may be an urban legend; I've never been able to confirm it, but it's not inconsistent with the daily inflation)}. Or Yugoslavia, which lopped off 30 digits . . . ]

[cloudtrack, err, flare, verification? *REALLY*]

And of further interest, I've never seen one in the US that was a round number of cents--they all end in 9/10 of a cent. (although in years past, 4/10 was also common)

China calling Elon. Come in, Elon! :)

bah.

Let me know when they start making *autographic* 120 film again. I have the camera, and am dying to shoot a roll!

The last rolls were apparently made in 1932. The cameras had a flap that could flip up and allow writing directly onto the film with a stylus. When you see handwriting on an old picture print, it was likely shot on autographic.

[and, yes, in fact my autographic camera *does* have bellows!]

That Electrolux isn't really an Electrolux.

a couple of decades ago, in one of those weird corporate maneuvers, it sold the name, and now sells its vacuums under another name, while the buyer sells non-electrolux as Electrolux.

So what she knows of Electrolux from the late 20th and early 21st centuries no longer applies.

But, yes, they were very good and lasted forever. Also extremely pricey.