Category: Knowledge

Seven famous Old West gunslingers

Scoop, ... 4 comments.

I don’t always find a revelation on these lists, but on this one I learned about a new-to-me bad guy, Henry Newton Brown. He was one of the Regulators.

These guys didn’t usually have a long lifespan. Brown was dead at 26. The linked article says he was hanged by a lynch mob, but Wikipedia says that although his three accomplices were hanged, Brown was killed trying to escape the lynch mob.

Ol’ Henry was unusual among these typically scruffy sidewinders in that he had movie star good looks, which raises the question of why he’s never been given significant representation in a Western. According to Wikipedia again, the only time he has been portrayed by name was in an episode of Death Valley Days, where he was played by rugged tough guy William Smith (who did resemble him).

What Happens When You Toss a Paper Plane From the ISS?

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These Physicists Found Out

Thanks to its airplane-shaped folding, the paper plane is statically stable in the vacuum-like upper reaches of space. It points nose-first into the airstream, guided by the subtle aerodynamic forces acting on its paper form.

This initial phase of descent, researchers found, is surprisingly calm. The plane passively maintains orientation for several days as it spirals downward, shedding altitude rapidly. “Atmospheric entry from a 400 km circular orbit occurs within a few days,” the authors write.

As the article explains, this is not just a whim. I was surprised to read that the simulation has practical applications, but the explanation does make sense.

Well – sorta.

Elon Musk has formed a third party – and the internet has started goofing on him

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The America Party.

Almost immediately after he made his announcement on X, fake new party filings started popping up.

As of Monday afternoon, there were multiple political parties listed in the Federal Election Commission database formed in the hours since Musk’s Saturday X post, with versions of “America Party” or “DOGE” or “X” in the name, or Musk listed among people affiliated with the entity. But none appeared to be real, listing contacts for the organization as email addresses such as ” wentsnowboarding@yahoo.com ″

R.I.P. the blue screen of death

Scoop, ... 5 comments.

Streamlining the unexpected restart experience.

Yeah. I’d appreciate it more if they kept the blue screens but solved the problems that make them appear so frequently.

And while you’re at it, MS, you can also make it possible to get back in when a computer glitch screws up the acceptance of a PIN or password.

This is an actual bit of advice from the Microsoft web site:

If you forget the administrator password and don’t have a password reset disk or another administrator account, you won’t be able to reset the password. If there are no other user accounts on the computer, you won’t be able to log on to Windows and will need to re-install Windows.

That’s wrong of course, in many ways.

First of all, I didn’t “forget” jack. The problem is yours, not mine. During a routine shutdown/boot-up, your system just suddenly stopped accepting the same password it has used for 10 years. Take responsibility for your fuck-ups, figure out why this happens, and solve it.

Second, many people have faced and solved the problem, and there are tutorials online. (Of course you need to use a phone or second computer to view the tutorials, but that’s not such a big deal.) For example, one guy on YouTube specializes in dumpster-dive computers, so he learned to get in without ever knowing the password of the original user. At least tell us that on your website before we re-install the OS.

Third, this is something that should be fixed by the system designers, and the workarounds should be offered by the originators, not by a random dumpster diver!

Fourth, it’s no longer possible to talk to a Microsoft troubleshooter when their website has outdated, incomplete or incorrect advice. You get shunted off to third parties, and they charge for their time.

California’s newest Trader Joe’s is across the street from a Trader Joe’s

Scoop, ... 9 comments.

We plan to keep both stores open

This probably seems odder to you than it does to me. When I was running a group of 7-Eleven stores in Miami, two of my stores were literally back-to-back. The trick was, of course, that one of the stores was on US 1, and the other was on the bend of a smaller neighborhood road that turned away from US 1 without ever connecting. Both stores were successful, but I didn’t keep the neighborhood store open 24 Hours, because it was possible (albeit not very convenient) to drive from one lot to the other, and nobody would have given you any grief about doing that at 2 AM.

5 Outdated Grammar Rules To Break

Scoop, ... 7 comments.

As the story goes, Winston Churchill had the ultimate comeback to someone who told him he should not end a sentence with a preposition: “That is a rule up with which I will not put.”

I’ll add one more to the list.

Forget about using nominative pronouns after the verb “to be” or equivalent verbs like “to become.”

I had a professor who said, “‘It is I’ is actually correct English, but unless you want to be deemed a pompous ass, you shouldn’t say it unless it is immediately followed by “Don Quixote, Lord of La Mancha.”

I considered what he said and realized he was right. Has anyone ever answered the telephone query “Who is this?” with “It’s I” or “It is I”? If you heard that, you’d assume you were talking to a weirdo.

This is a case where I don’t always follow my own advice. I had those rules drilled into my brain so incessantly that, without thinking, I still type things like “Yes, that was she.” The app called Grammarly annoyingly corrects my correct English and tells me to use “her,” as I suppose it should, to reflect modern usage.

Of course, that app also just tried to correct its own name in the paragraph above, so perhaps it still needs some refinement.