Random Thoughts: Meat, Electricity, and Mutants

I hate opening a bottle of 15-year-old Scotch because then I have explain to it about 9/11.

Who tends to be more far left: Someone who claims to be left-of-center or someone who claims to be moderate?

Man, poor Illinois. It was the last state that wasn’t the Wild West with everyone shooting each other, but now it has concealed carry.

The only way to make a vegetable fit for human consumption is to feed it to a cow and then eat the cow.

Whoever figured out how to make a gummy vitamin has done more for American health than Obamacare ever could.

Kind of like how we put iodine in salt and fluoride in water, can’t we just fortify corn syrup with all the nutrients we need?

I wish I got to decide which viewpoints we should tolerate and which ones we shouldn’t.

It would probably help race relations if people were more careful about which things they make big racial issues out of.

Somehow I got a degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and still don’t know a thing about how an electrical outlet works.

Well, I guess that’s the difference between an electrical engineer and an electrician.

The main thing I know about electricity is that it’s invisible and it wants to kill me.

In all my engineer courses, they always assumed that you plugged it in and that part worked, so the outlet never came up.

I’d like some sort of reality show that showed us the lives of internet trolls.

Probably 20 years late on this question, but what even is flow control? Default in HyperTerminal is “hardware” but I’ve only ever used none.

“Rule 1, don’t talk about Fight Club. Rule 2… Rule 3, profit.”

“Thanks for saving me! How’d you get your powers? Spider bite? Super serum?”
“Born with them.”
“I DISCRIMINATE AGAINST YOU!” -Marvel universe

Technically, aren’t the characters from The Incredibles all mutants since they just seem to be born with powers?

A surprise attack leading people into a rush to war – it’s pretty eerie how much that Michael Bay film Pearl Harbor predicted 9/11.

Making a kid’s story titled “Milo the Robber Baron.” Kids like robber barons, right?

11 Comments

  1. Somehow I got a degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and still don’t know a thing about how an electrical outlet works.

    Serious question: I’m an old school electronics technician, and learning my trade meant understanding how things like semiconductor bias* worked. About twenty-five years back, a friend told me this was no longer being taught to technicians and digital engineers becuase it’s no longer commonly observed; it all happens inside the chip. I know most of the stuff Frank says shouldn’t be taken seriously, but how close to the truth is that one about outlets?

    (*hey. I said serious question)

  2. Apostolic — I went to Frank’s rival CWRU at about the same time and we didn’t talk so much about outlets at all either. About the closest we got to it was Kirchhoff’s rules. I assume an outlet is just a properly keyed low resistance connector, except for GFCI’s. I learned about hot/neutral/ground from my dad

  3. Maybe I should also clarify — there were classes on Power Engineering that I suspect would cover this, but you didn’t have to take them for the degree course if you didn’t want to go into that field and wanted to work in computers instead.

  4. I wish I got to decide which viewpoints we should tolerate and which ones we shouldn’t.

    Have you considered applying for a job at MSNBC? They all wish that they got to decide that, too.

  5. Flow control comes in three flavors.

    1. None. One wire to send, one to receive. Both sides assume the other can receive faster than they are sending. Yes it is as insane as it sounds but almost every serial port you see these days works this way. And it mostly works… except of course when it doesn’t and hillarity ensues.

    2. Software. Special codes in the ASCII character set (XON And XOFF) are reserved to request the other side stop or stop sending. This sort of inband signalling along with the original highly popular 7bit character framing give us most of the messy bits of computing to this day. This was usually how it was done ‘back in the day’ for dumb terminals, printers, etc.

    3. Hardware. How God meant things work. Separate signal lines in both directions indicated each side’s readiness to receive data. Everything just works… but you need more wires and apparently that costs money or something so other than very short modem cables you rarely seem them.

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