While it would he handy to have everything integrated, it’s not always vital. We don’t need to convert kilograms to seconds very often. Artificially enforced systems have always had trouble replacing older anachronistic ones that are otherwise still useful. Ask people in the UK about their cars’ efficiency and you’ll often get an answer in miles per gallon.

There’s nothing magical about 10, either, other than the accidents of evolution that left us with ten fingers. Base 12 is also extremely convenient, and comes from Sumerians counting with their thumb against each of the three joints on 4 fingers. Go through that process once for each finger on the other hand, and you get 60. And of course, in any industry where things are packed into packages, like nearly everything we buy, dozens fit better than tens. 60 divides very neatly into many convenient and geometrically simple fractions, and a lot of what we do with circles benefits from this.

We probably would have been better standardizing on a base unit that’s a power of two, which has more mathematical weight than ten does.

What a thought…we’ll have to form opinions of people based upon what they write, not on points that could always be faked or whored. Popularity is an incredibly stupid measure of quality. I’d like to see the up/down arrow on threads replaced by a simple view counter, too.

It’s an invasive species that has been working its way west across North America. I hadn’t heard of it in SoCal yet; this would be a drag. OP, what lake was it in? There may be rangers or similar authorities you could notify so they could look.

My mom was part of that hippie generation that gave LOTR its first taste of success. I read her copies about 1970 or so. That generation of fandom was quite different from what there is today. Now we’ve got volume after volume of additional information and stories and wonderfulness, but back then there was LOTR, The Hobbit, and some scholarly works. We couldn’t even be baffled by the Silmarilion yet!

That’s not the least of what makes me unhappy about the Google search experience lately. The thing I don’t like is how much it sucks. Like, really really sucks. It was the paradigm of mind-boggling usefulness at one point. Now it’s an ad server with occasionally marginally relevant results.

It’s a no-brainer. I was an early addict of Usenet, and never found the same utility and community when everyone left for the bright shiny corporate sites (and usenet became harder and harder to access since it wasn’t making any billionaires richer.) The Fediverse is what is needed to take the internet back. I just feel bad that it took me so long to start. I joined Mastodon in January and am a thousand times more active there than I ever was at the birdsite, because my account is growing and morphing to fit MY needs. The same will happen with Lemmy and Kbin, and I hope with peertube and all the others. I keep saying it…the Fediverse is what we should have been doing all along, rather than tolerating the billionaires because it was “convenient”.

No specific quote, just a thought that Vimes has several times…If you’ll do something bad for a good reason, you’re that much closer to doing something bad for a bad reason.

Obscuring locations makes me feel better, but as you say, it means close to nothing. I wouldn’t bother.

I’m in :)

W6KME, Keith. CVARC (education Director, Field Day coordinator), VCARS (Secretary), VCARC (plain old regular ham). ARRL VE, instructor, ACS/ARES for Ventura County CA. Perpetual newbie and student. Co-founder and current manager of the BORED Net Group, which runs a daily VHF net, monthly µField Day (read “micro field day”), and annual Silent Key memorial, and some much larger events in planning. www.theborednet.net

STP felt that he himself was “discovering what happened” (a JRRT phrase) as he wrote, so I read them chronologically, in the same order the author did (so to speak.) There are a lot of other good options for reading order, and few bad ones, but that’s what I always tell people to do.