• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I think the availability of AA batteries is higher, 18650 is much less standard than AA in most people’s homes. I would rather have options, so saying AA but having a swappable battery tray is how I would go, but I like kludgey stuff anyway.

    That said, I just did a battery replacement for a lithium pouch on some TWS headphones and it was a fairly simple process. Making it a port rather than soldered wires would make it much easier and would make battery replacement a quick and routine task. Hopefully more companies will more towards ports for batteries and maybe even a standard port that is the same for a given voltage/amperage combination so swapping out can be done with confidence.



  • I was expecting answers but got jokes, not disappointed, just enjoying the jokes.

    As for asymptotes, many mathematical functions have a value they are going towards but never quite reach. One example would be to start with 1 and then halve it, then halve it, then halve it, and keep going forever. It will trend towards 0 but never ever reach it.

    Another example of approaching 0 is y = 1/x which is a cool graph. There is a curve which starts just to the right of the Y axis at maximum Y value and comes almost straight down, curves out to 1,1 then shoots out along towards the X axis almost but never reaching it. The cool thing is it does the exact same in the lower left quadrant with the line coming from the negative X axis, passing -1,-1, the shooting down the Y axis.



  • Handedness is not constant over the animal kingdom.

    Kangaroos and wallabies tend to be left handed, though wallabies seem to be right handed for strength tasks. In dogs, horses, and cats females have been shown to be left handed, while males are right handed. All of these are tendencies and not at all strict, so specific inviduals may be left or right handed with no regard to their sex or species, but the trend is there.

    The level of handedness that humans have is really white extreme compared to our closest cousins. Other primates are far less handed and one of the things that drives this may be tool use and associated teaching. If you are teaching someone how to do something and they have opposite handedness to you it is harder to teach, and also shared tools are easier to manage if they are not in two different versions.

    The causes seem to be a mix of genetics, developmental cues, and maybe brain structure, though the exact amounts of each and whether there are other factors are unclear.



  • I will say, as a Dvorak user, I think it would be awful for mobile. I don’t know the mathematics for calculating it but Dvorak assumes four fingers per hand spread evenly across the keyboard.

    I wonder what the most efficient layout would be for single digit letter pecking. I can imagine it would be different to both Dvorak and Qwerty, but what exactly it would be I don’t know. Maybe separating most likely next letters by side and having some consistency of vowels on one side, consonants on the other, but all of the stuff about rolls and sequences would be completely changed. Maybe differently sized buttons for more common letters, or reducing the number of shown letters to have a few flick letters that you swipe in a direction to get them? Maybe just having the top ten most common letters displayed as single buttons and then the remaining 16 as four swipe keys?





  • Once again we hit the wondrous conflation of correlation and causation.

    Grip strength is not something that you can train to have an outsized impact on your health. It is a good marker because it is not something people often train, it is something that an active life will naturally train, and it tends to be a part of most upper body exercises.

    It would be like saying people who carry lots of cash live longer, so you should carry lots of cash. People who are richer have less worry about carrying cash and it is a good indicator they are not running all the way out of money each week. Taking money with you won’t make you rich and it won’t change whether you can afford good healthcare, food, housing, or a lower stress life. Impacting how much cash you carry won’t make you live longer, but measuring it across the population is a simple proxy for wealth and therefore health.

    Come on The Guardian. Get a science reporter who cab actually do their job, someone who has at least a bachelor of science and ideally took some critical thinking units.


  • Yeah, it is a fairly large dataset depending on the tower location. For example, in an inner city locale you may have hundreds of devices on a single passenger train going past a local tower. These transient handsets used to cause a massive issue with drop outs and loss of signal as they would acquire and then drop service from a given tower. Nowadays we have solutions for this which centre around shaped beams along the direction of travel with communication between towers to ignore handsets which are moving along a travel corridor.

    To make that clearer, imagine the overhead train line has passengers moving along and under the train line people are walking on the street. The various towers which are along the train line will pass information about which handsets are moving and which are local so the local towers can handle local handsets and specific towers above can handle the train customers. This keeps the lower towers from changing their directionality and dropping calls and data confections, but also allows the train handsets to have reasonable connection to the network.

    Another interesting case is what used to happen at the edge of the range for a tower. The whole tower could modulate its power so it could reach a far off handset if nobody else was around, extending the effective range. This unfortunately meant that if someone came closer to the tower it would have to lower its power to not harm the handset and the person far away would lose signal.

    Nowadays the power level can be handled per handset. Each handset gets a small portion of a second, actually a small handful of parts of a second, and the power of the tower is adjusted to reach them at their required level for their time slots. If someone comes online close to the tower you may have competition for the time of the tower and thus lower speeds but the power will still match your handset independently of the rest. Very cool technology, way better than what it was with GSM, and also much more secure.


  • Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.