Dangit, how do they know I lack confidence in a dance-off??
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I laughed at the thought of Inventor losing a dance contest to a mantis… and then I laughed harder imagining Space Ghoast and Zorack having a dance off.
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Most insects do! It’s why mantids are so effective as predators!
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Annoying: My phone stopped working yesterday for no discernible reason as I was finishing up a call to pay part of my phone bill, and still isn’t working after hours of charging, multiple battery pulls(I’m lucky enough to have the rare phone model that still has a removable battery), and leaving the battery out overnight… all I can get it to do if vibrate for a bit when trying to boot it up after inserting the battery, and all my household’s resident phone expert can report is the manufactuere’s logo blinking on the screen and a green indicator light… After stumbling around my service provider’s website Iwas able to find the model and googled it, finding both the phone’s page on the manufacturer’s website and on my service provider’s support database, but nothing that didn’t require the phone to at least boot properly. And with my housemate’s work schedule, it’ll be Sunday at the earliest I can get out to my service provider’s local store to see if they can figure anything out… I hope its something as simple as there being some secret button combo to enter a recovery mode, but I fear this might be the first time I need to replace a phone due to spontaneous hardware failure.
Bright side that brings things to neutral: Don’t have to deal with the constant spam calls and roughly daily spam texts for the next few days, the chances of missing an actually important call are practically nil as I can’t recall the last time I recieved a time critical phone call, none of the services I’m likely to log-in to over the next week that use 2-factor authentication insist on using a spam text for such, it’s unlikely my online banking will pull its 2 factor get a robo call and enter the code shown on the website to the robo caller BS in the next week as I usually only get that that after something like a clean install of Linux or a new browser profile, I’ve already paid my bill for October to the credit card with the impossible to get through security on its website, and while paying the last bit of my pohne bill online is more annoying than paying it over the phone, it’s at least doable… In short, there’s nothing time critical I need my phone for, and most of my phone usage over the next week if it were working would fall into "using the phone is the easy way, not the only way or it can wait)… Also, the phone is paid off and the line is eligible for a new phone, I was just hoping this phone would last me until at least 2030… also, while disconnected, I still have my previous phone, it still works, and it still have all my contacts for someone who can type on a numpad can copy over if I need a new phone and there’s no way to retrieve my contacts from the dead phone or my contacts get deleted in a recovery procedure… only reason I got my current phone is because the previous phone is a 3G phone and my provider was dropping their 3G support. Also, if I do need to get a new phone, I’m close enough to paying off the one phone on another line that prevents me from dropping a line that’s not being used and seeing if I can switch to a better priced plan, so I don’t have to worry about being locked into my current plan for an extra 2-3 years to not have to pay monthly finance charges on a new phone… which is nice, because I’m sick of paying ~42USD per line per month for 4 lines, 1 which isn’t being used and another that’s only being used for paying a few bills where calling a n automated phone system is the easiest or only way for me to do so and the fact the world expects you to have a valid phone number even if its never used for anything that isn’t spammy, especially when YouTube has been bombarding me with ads from my cellular provider for 4 lines for $90 a month… which is probably ad bullspeak, but still lower than what I was quoted when switching to my current plan.
Genuinely positive: last night I enjoyed a nice midnight snack of a couple of cheddar, provolone, peper jack, and pepperoni wraps microwaved to melt the cheese… messy since you get a lot of runny grease you don’t with a cold deli wrap, and it means I’ll run out of tortillas and cheese before I finish off the deli ham and turkey that I use in addition to the pepperoni and cheese for cold wraps, but oh so good to the taste buds.
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This is an incredible achievement! Would you say a little more about the book?
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Thanks! And of course. It’s in Dutch, and the title means: Infinity. A philosophical guide. It’s aimed at the general public. It’s to some extent an overview of the philosophy of infinity (with some physics and mathematics thrown in here and there), but it’s very much my overview, leading to my conclusions and interpretations.
Topics discussed include: the paradoxes of Zeno, whether space can have a border (including discussions of Aristotle and Einstein), whether space can be finite, whether past time could be infinite, whether our lives would have meaning if the universe were infinitely large, Blanqui’s theory of infinite identical planets, Nietzsche’s ideas of eternal recurrence, the question whether we should want to be immortal (either on Earth or in Heaven), how mortality shapes our lives, the mathematics of infinite numbers (cardinals and ordinals), Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics and his impatience with infinity, Kant as the champion of the autonomy of finite beings, and how to be finite.
It’s by first book, and I’m proud of it, but also nervous about the reception. Boom, the publisher, is probably the most well-known publisher of (non-academic) philosophy in the Netherlands, so I hope that will help with the book being picked up and reviewed by some of the national newspapers… but I don’t know whether that will happen, and of course I known even less whether anybody will like it!
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This sounds exactly like my jam. Welp, time to learn Dutch!
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Let’s hope it’s such an astounding success that it will be translated. Though I don’t think there’s a huge Dutch-to-other-languages pipeline. 
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More wildlife updates!
So, yesterday I had seen a very large beetle by the front door. I was worried it might fly inside, so I didn’t take the time to look at it carefully, but it was on the floor, in a corner.
I went back outside today to check it out, since my mom said that something big was still there. I went around the house to keep the front door closed.
Well, I don’t know what I saw the other day, but now there’s a large, eight-legged friend – a yellow-back orb weaver – who has set up shop. There’s no trace of the beetle. Either the beetle crawled away, or the spider ate it, or the spider was sleeping before, and it looked like a beetle silhouette with its legs tucked in. However, I’m doubtful of the latter, because I didn’t see any bright colors on the beetle, and this spider has plenty of those.
Image description: A very large spider; almost stereotypical in appearance. The legs are very obviously segmented, and have tufts of dark sensory hairs. Coloration makes it look like the spider is wearing black thigh-highs, with an orange carapace underneath. The prosoma seems to be a light gray, and the opisthosoma has yellow spots decorating each side. Four additional yellow dots symmetrically appear on either side of the typical heartmark area, but the heartmark of this species seems to be black, just like the surrounding carapace. The spider is hanging upside-down, and facing away from the camera.
These seem to be pretty common for the area; this one is actually the fifth member I’ve found of this species, just within this year alone. Unlike the smaller orb weaver on the porch, these ones are a lot more calm, and are always spending their time in perfect stillness. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one move before.
EDIT: Future spider posts will be made in this other thread, from now-on!
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I’ve been wanting to learn Dutch anyway, but I’d also love to read this book after translation. I find the ways infinity gets used in physics and mathematics to be really interesting, especially comparing its use inside and outside of calculus! 
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MY MINI MECHANICAL KEYBOARD WORKS PROPERLY
The D key has been double-tapping since I got it, and it’s been driving me crazy. I found this video, which describes a solution, and it 100% solved the problem.
Finally, I can change directories without errors.
EDIT: Nevermind, it’s busted again. 
Oh well.
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As an antique chemistry and physics major, I would love to have an english translation!
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It’s my birthday today 
I’m officially a year older, uh, sorta. If you think about it, ages are kinda these static things - like yesterday, I was a “year younger” - but wasn’t it just a day younger?
As you can probably tell, I haven’t slept much 
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You could start calling them versions instead of years and write release notes on your birthday for the latest release 
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Lol that’s actually pretty funny - I kinda wanna do them now…
Also, welcome to the IF Forum!
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I guess that makes me currently v39rc1 since my 39th birthday is 2 weeks from tomorrow… On a related note, I recently realized I’m now older than my mom was when I was born… got another 5 years or so to match my father’s age when I was born.
Started making my beaded candy sack today. After some thought, I decided on 96 beads for the sack’s circumfrence… my first thought was 91 because 7*13, numbers with lots of superstitions about them, but realized an odd number of beads would cause problems… next thought was 78, a multiple of 13 and the number of cards in a Taro deck, but I then realized that the simpler way I can think to close the bottom of the bag requires a multiple of 4 and thought 78 or 80 might result in too small a mouth for the sack… landed on 96 as both a decent size and because it’s 3 times a power of 2, which I think might work for making a round bottom similar to the bottom I made for a small basket that the sack is basically a larger version of… the idea when I get to the bottom will be have a progression of bead rows that have half as many beads as the previous row, ending with three beads at the center of the bottom. So far, I’ve made the first orange stripe that will be the brim of the sack and I have the first bag of green beads in a beverage bottle ready to make the first green stripe. And as I was making it, I cleared out my backlog of recently posteed chapters to on-going serialized fiction and I’ve also cleared the sub-50 minute part of my YouTube backlog. SO far, my sack has about 2 inches of depth… If I stick to my original plan of 12 stripes, I’m looking at about 2 feet deep for the finished sack… Also, 96 beads of circumfrence turns out to be abou the right size for a headband, so if the round bottom works out, I might try making a beaded hat.
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WOAH. That’s a lot larger than I expected!
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Bram Jagersma, one of the world’s leading authorities (probably the leading authority) on Sumerian grammar, is working on a new version of his textbook—and in a pre-release chapter, he argues that the Sumerian word nen means not “this one” but “one like this”.
This changes everything—the famous Sumerian “dog walks into a bar” joke has to be completely reinterpreted! Now the dog says not “I’ll open this one” but “I’ll open one like this”!
(For anyone who doesn’t study ancient languages for a living—the world’s oldest known bar joke is written in Sumerian. The traditional translation was “A dog walks into a bar. He says, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” What exactly this means has long been a mystery.)
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That’s based on one stripe being 5 beads tall, the beads being 9mm in diameter, adding half a bead to account for the zig-zagginess, rounding the resulting 49.5 mm to 2inches, and multiplying by 12 since my original plan was to repeat the orange-green-purple pattern 4 times… and if the round bottom works out, I’m thinking of making the bottom solid orange… though now that I think about it, the half beads are probably cancelled out by the fact the firs row of one stripe and the last row of the previous stripe mesh their protruding beads, and 2 inches is 50.8 mm by the modern definition of the inch, so adding more than half an inch from rounding… granted, no clue how flat or bulgey the bottom will be…the little round basket I made previously has a dimpled bottom, but it also has an outer circumfrence of 32 beads if memory serves, endded up with 4 beads meeting at the center of the bottom, plus that was stringed withsome thin strips of fabric that were originally accent stripes on some atheletic pants if memory serves and i’m using fishing line for the sack.
I may decide after 2 or 3 iterations of the pattern(corresponding to estimated depths of 12" and 18") that it’s deep enough for the given circumference and that a 4th iteration would be too deep for a bag of this width, but that’s one of the things I’m playing by ear(or I suppose hand).
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