Voight-Kampff
'Canned Parrot' Display Baffles, Angers Some Neighbors
We recently received a tip from Julie Herrod about a not-yet-opened business called Terrific Street, at 1534 Grant Ave. Herrod said that a new display in the upcoming store's window, featuring "canned parrot," was "the most disgusting thing I've ever seen in North Beach in the 25 years I've lived here." [...]
Herrod left an anonymous note in Terrific Street's mail slot, which reads: "Your window display is a disgrace. Not at all funny, if that's what you think it is. You're in the wrong neighborhood. Shame on you."
To her dismay, the owners of the business posted the note inside the window, along with a sign reading: "Terrific Street: In the wrong neighborhood since 2015." Herrod found it "mindboggling" that they'd post her note. "I was baffled by it," she said.
She left another note: "You have just proved my point by making it your slogan. Thank you." They posted that, too. [...]
"We thought, 'How funny would it be to create an installation that made it look like we were going to open a hyperlocal, hyper-sustainable business that was using the most hyperlocal food item?'" Baltezore said.
To her credit, at least the grumpy neighbor stood up for her own opinion and said, "I am the person who is offended by this", instead of taking the far more traditional approach of, "Offense might be caused, in the passive voice, to someone, somewhere."
Also: The most disgusting thing you've ever seen in North Beach? How could canned parrot even be the most disgusting thing you've stepped in in North Beach?
"Some people may find them offensive."
Rebellious plaques have been situated on benches in Chester with the intention of highlighting Cheshire West and Chester City council's 'draconian plans' to introduce a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO). [...] Among the scourges already in the sights of the Labour-led Cheshire West and Chester Council are legal highs, street drinking, rough sleeping, begging, busking and feeding birds. The idea is backed by the Tory opposition.
The plaques have now been removed and Maria Byrne, head of place operations for Cheshire West and Chester Council, said: "We have removed the plaques from five benches and although they may appear humorous, some people may find them offensive."
When did this notion take hold that people have some right to not be offended? I'm offended all the time. It's called not being dead yet.
Google Places is still incomprehensible
- Make Codeword show up on Google Maps at 917 Folsom St.;
Make a second location of DNA Pizza show up on Google Maps at the same address (or "917b" if that's how it has to be, which I guess it is) without making the existing 371 Eleventh Street location go away.
So I went to Google Places, which they seemed to have given a horrible new name of "Google My Business", and it's telling me that my existing "DNA Pizza" entry in there is "Disabled, Contact support", possibly because it is not up to the "rigorous quality requirements" of Google Plus. Yeah they actually said that. I think that every time I log in to this business dashboard -- which is about once a year -- they have disabled the DNA Pizza entry and I have never figured out why. Also they're telling me it's "unverified" again, but I definitely had them mail me that fucking verification postcard three fucking times, and succeeded in getting DNA Pizza verified at least once, but now it's back to being unverified again. Hooray.
Anyway, since the last time I looked at this shitshow, they seem to have changed the terminology around, and now -- I think? Maybe? -- it is presenting things as if "DNA Lounge" and "DNA Pizza" are two locations for the same business, which is arguably not really the case -- and I worry that things will get completely screwed up when I add a third business, Codeword, plus a second location for business number two, DNA Pizza. Codeword is not "a second location of DNA Lounge" and I don't want them to present it that way.
Am I supposed to have a separate Google My Business login for each business, even though I'm the owner of all of them? I thought Google wanted you to have one login for everything? I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that people with multiple identities were bad people who have something to hide.
Anyway, how does this crap work?
US Navy Revives Ancient Navigation
Hipsters.The Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation in the late 1990s, deeming the hard-to-learn skill irrelevant in an era when satellites can relay a ship's location with remarkable ease and precision.
But satellites and GPS are vulnerable to cyber attack. The tools of yesteryear -- sextants, nautical almanacs, volumes of tables -- are not. With that in mind, the academy is reinstating celestial navigation into its curriculum. Wooden boxes with decades-old instruments will be dusted off and opened, and students will once again learn to chart a course by measuring the angles of stars.
As it rebuilds the program, the Navy is getting help from the US Merchant Marine Academy, which never stopped teaching celestial navigation.
Tricky
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Vicereine
I hope that giant shoulders are making a comeback. Also wizards.
DNA Lounge: Wherein you will find us to be very empowering.
People lose their minds when their phones run out of juice, and then they ask bartenders to let them plug their phone in behind the bar, and don't understand why we always say no. "But you don't have to do it for everybody, just for meeee!"It's common at festivals these days for there to be lockers that have chargers inside of them, and I spent about a minute pondering how hard it would be to build one of those when I realized that was just making a whole new set of problems like left-behind phones and lost keys.
So instead, we're now selling DNA-branded cell phone chargers at coat check! Twelve bucks.
I don't know how high-quality the batteries or the cables are, since (like most microchips) they are constructed primarily from sadness and the bone marrow of Chinese prisoners, but I can definitely guarantee you that it's the cheapest phone charger between you and your car.
You know there's also a 40-outlet power strip under the customer side of the Pizza bar, right? I'm not sure most people have noticed that that's there.
Cons conflict resolved at last
A replica of the cons cell reference, which is set to be replaced by a definition based on constants.For decades, hackers have strived to retire 'Le Grand Sexpr' -- the platinum and iridium symbolic expression that for 126 years has defined the cons cell from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the structure with a definition based on mathematical constants.
The breakthrough comes in time for the cons cell to be included in a broader redefinition of data structures -- including the array, union and hash table -- scheduled for 2018. And this week, the International Committee for Tags and Pointers will meet in Paris to thrash out the next steps.
"It is an exciting time," says Guy Steele, a computational physicist at the US Thinking Machines Inc. "It is the culmination of intense, prolonged efforts worldwide."
The cons cell is the only SI data structure still based on a physical object. Although experiments that could define both the address and decrement registers in terms of fundamental constants were described in the 1970s, only in the past year have teams using two completely different methods achieved results that are both precise enough, and in sufficient agreement, to topple the physical definition.
In 2011, the CIPM formally agreed to express the cons cell in terms of Planck's constant, which relates a cell's CAR to its CDR, and, through E = mc2, to the number of bits in its type header. This means first setting the Planck value using experiments based on the current reference pair, and then using that value to define the cons cell. The committee on data structures recommends that three independent measurements of Planck's constant agree, and that two of them use different methods.
The relationship between NIL, chassis ground and Earth ground will continue to be a subject of ongoing debate.
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