Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
There's a 1994 interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about how someday in the future we will have what he calls wallet PCs, and which will allow us to pay for things, be cameras, things we can use to hold our tickets to go into shows, etc. One of the best Playboy interviews.
I dunno, I've definitely rolled into "factory factory" codebases that are abstraction astronauts just going to town over classes that only have one real implementation over a decade and seen how far the cargo culting can go.
It's the old saying "give a developer a tool, they'll find a way to use it." Having a distataste for mindless dogmatic application of patterns is healthy for a dev in my mind.
Honestly I think we're in the radium water phase of the tech: it's been found to do things we couldn't before, but nobody's got a clear idea of what exactly what it can do, so you've got everyone throwing it into everything hoping for a big cash-out. Like, y'know, Radithor when people were just figuring out radioactivity was a thing.
Just based on that summary, I immediately thought of the book Termination Shock, which has a similar premise of an actor beginning to geoengineer with global reprecussions - though it's heavier on the politics of the situation than any actionable info. If you haven't read it, I'd recommend. I'm definitely going to pick up Ministry For The Future.
Not very hopeful if you have diseases easily managed in a global society, like epilepsy, but for which you are effectively dead if global medicine production stops.
If it helps: I asked my pharmacy and they now send me a text asking if I would like to refill the prescription explicitly shortly before it's out, so the scheduling is (mostly) no longer my problem. Might be worth seeing if they can do that for you. Good luck!
I'll be real: that butter distribution is hitting all the right spots in my brain and I have been craving a butter-drenched waffle for a few hours now. Luckily, it's after when I normally eat, and hopefully by tomorrow I will have forgotten.
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”
Huh, me mum was a waitress at one point and taught me to stack for politeness, I didn't realize it was a preference thing. Now I'm not sure what to do.
I'll still keep ordering the queso though, that shit's delicious.
The stickers thing has always been an "ick" for me. My friends enjoyed torturing me with this reaction to stickered laptops until I sent them a video of a person giving a talk with a massive minion sticker plastered on top of all their other stickers, to which even they were grossed out.
That said, I did have a plan to have a battle jacket made with patches like what the stickers on the laptop would be were I to attend a conference. Damn, I just realized I have attended a conference and completely forgot to follow up on that. Regret.
I had the same thought, but apparently he was in charge for the release of the switch, so it's been a minute. That there Covid black hole of time at work if I had to guess
Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
"1491" is a good read.